Zapatista rebels embark on transformation

The Zapatista rebels embarked on a historic transformation today at a mass meeting intended to take them out of their jungle hideouts and into the cut-throat world of Mexican politics.

It left some of their supporters wondering whether they would also have to leave behind their trademark ski masks, poetic rhetoric and Indian constituency.

The rebels, who have not left southern Chiapas state in nearly five years, drew more than 1,000 supporters to the jungle town La Garrucha to debate and explain how the armed movement would turn itself into the “peaceful civic, nationalist, leftist and anti-capitalist” movement.

The rebels said they will announce the schedule for a national tour by Subcomandante Marcos and other top combatants and sought to reassure supporters that they will forge on as before.

“We will continue our struggle; we’re not going to give up or sell out,” a bandana-masked rebel leader who identified himself only as Moises told the gathering.

Still, some urban activists who forged down mud-caked back roads to support the Zapatistas wondered how the movement could move into Mexico’s sprawling cities while maintaining an armed wing in the jungle.

“In a strong movement, a well-organised movement, people act openly, with their faces uncovered," said Armado Montiel, a Mexico City housing advocate who leads a socialist group.

“But we can’t tell Marcos to take off his mask,” he said as he sat on the grass at the gathering.

“He has worn it since the beginning, and it has worked.”

The rebels staged a brief uprising in January 1994 demanding the overthrow of the government.

They quickly settled into a tense cease-fire with the government and since then their movement has largely been non-violent and has focused on indigenous rights.

While many are enthused by the new campaign – which aims to rival the country’s 2006 presidential elections, and recoup public attention largely taken by charismatic leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador – others wonder whether the rebels can still hang on to their farm and Indian base while courting city dwellers.

“Indians and farmers are not by definition leftists,” said Chiapas anthropologist Jan de Vos, who has studied the movement. While the urban radicals who started the movement in 1984 blended with the Mayan Indians in Chiapas, “that symbiosis was achieved more at the rhetorical level than in reality.”

The rebels have already caused anxiety on Mexico’s left with stinging criticism of Lopez Obrador, the man most likely to win the 2006 presidential elections.

Little yet has been decided about the movement’s structure and platform. Remaining questions include “who can join and who can’t,” and “the organisational structure of the campaign, and what everyone will be assigned to do,” according to a rebel statement.

They have incited supporters, including leftists, anarchists and Indian rights activists, to form a new platform, the likes of which have rarely been seen in the Americas.