Last weekend I went to Magdalena to sit in on the meeting of La Otra Campana. The meeting is part of a tour of Mexico with The Sixth Commission of The Other Campaign, and is intended to be an opportunity for the indigenous leaders of each region to come together and discuss the issues facing them.

I don't know what the other meetings have been like, but this one felt like a rock concert. There were more people from other countries there than there were indigenous people. The word had spread through the border activist communities that Delegate Zero, the rebel formerly known as Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, would be in attendance. When he pulled up in his car, there was a media mob that followed him from the car into the hostel:

Of course, there was speculation about whether or not it was *really* Marcos, or if it was a body double. But does it really matter? The EZLN attracts considerable attention to its cause by having a celebrity rebel as its icon and leader. They were even selling t-shirts.

According to Irlandesa's Library there have been some groups within the movement who are dissatisfied with the tour of La Otra because it is cut off from its roots in the Lacandon Jungle, and makes decisions without consulting the grassroots.

So if Marcos is a fiction, he is a very clever fiction. If he is not, then I fear the Zapatista movement will go the way of many other revolutionary movements; factionalization which draws energy away from the fighting, rotting the movement from the inside, leaving only an empty balaclava and pipe to remember it by.

Whether or not it was the real Marcos, here he is, with some friends from No More Deaths

and from a new anti-biotechnology group:

behind a machete:

and receiving a drawing:

And one of the most interesting and perplexing facts about the event was that the federal police were in full cooperation. We were told that they were doing security for the event, and when we left we saw this: