> MEXICO CITY -- The pipe-smoking, ski-mask wearing Zapatista rebel leader Subcommander Marcos once again is firing his rhetorical cannon shots from his hideout in the jungle.
Through a flurry of tongue-in-cheek e-mails and letters, the man who spearheaded an indigenous rebellion in Chiapas in 1994 has challenged an Italian soccer team to a match with his hooded guerrillas, co-written a detective novel for a Mexico City newspaper and joked about his growing, un-guerrillalike belly.

His sense of humor is crucial, but to start of the article in such a mocking way tends to imply the man has nothing serious to say. In particular, the new and significant 6th Lancadon Declaration (www.narconews.com/Issue38/article1386.html) is notoriously not mentioned in the entire article.

> But then Marcos aimed a broadside at a more serious target when he attacked former Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, saying the country's leading presidential candidate is betraying his leftist roots and would "screw us all" if elected next year.

So, he is allowed to say a serious thing or two, but only regarding the election.

> In his first public appearance in four years, Marcos on Aug. 6 told a gathering of left-wing activists in Chiapas that the ex-mayor had positioned himself too far toward the political center and that the Zapatistas would "go with everything" to oppose him. Lopez Obrador, forced to respond just as he was launching a national tour Friday to drum up support, denied that he had forsaken his leftist past but refused to enter into a war of words with the iconic rebel leader.
"I respect his opinion," Lopez Obrador, who resigned his mayoral post last month to campaign, told a television interviewer. "I am a leftist, because I am a humanist."
Marcos' criticisms have ignited a debate in Mexico over the motives of the Zapatista leader and whether his latest pronouncements could hurt Lopez Obrador in the race to replace President Vicente Fox next July.

There is no debate about the substance of his criticisms? Maybe they are not just a ploy to help or hurt anyone's candidacy or to achieve some specific motive, but are quite simply, relevant criticism.

> Shift in tactics
Leaders of Lopez Obrador's Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, dismissed Marcos' remarks as "excessive," saying they could help the return of the autocratic and corruption-stained Institutional Revolutionary Party, which was in power when the Zapatistas rebelled.

Yes, similarly we weren't supposed to criticize Kerry's glaring problems as we didn't want to strengthen Bush.

>Among many conspiracy theories is that Marcos is secretly helping Lopez Obrador's campaign by highlighting that he is not a radical.

This technique is very familiar from politics in the US, people like Clarke, O'Neil, Wilson -- we are told that no one can have an opinion about a candidate without some angle they are working.

> Others believe Marcos' attack, along with the soccer challenge and other crafty public-relations moves for which he has become famous, is merely part of an effort to help the isolated, cash-strapped Zapatista movement survive and re-emerge as a national player.

How about the possibility that the Zapatistas are not just trying to be players, but actually want to share, develop, learn and participate in the thousands of groups they have already inspired around the world.

> Six weeks ago, after issuing a "red alert," the Zapatistas issued a communique saying they would retreat from the idea of an armed struggle and instead try to open a political dialogue with other Mexican leftists to work for social and economic reforms "without guns, with a civil peaceful movement."

This implies incorrectly that the Zapatistas had some kind of recent history with armed struggles.

>The Aug. 6 meeting with 30 leftist organizations in Chiapas was the first of several planned through mid-September.
"This is Marcos trying to maintain his relevancy in Mexican politics and global politics," said Pamela Starr, a political analyst with the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. "The Zapatistas have been looking for a way to re-enter Mexican politics and they couldn't do it militarily."

This kinda seems to imply that they would prefer to enter politics militarily but have to settle for their second choice.

> The relationship between the Zapatistas and Lopez Obrador's PRD has never been close. Marcos has condemned the left-wing party for not rejecting the free-market economic policies that he blames for poverty in developing countries.
In his attack on Lopez Obrador, he accused the PRD of failing to push hard enough for Indian-rights legislation that was proposed by Fox in 2001 but then watered down by Congress.

This sounds like an important idea to be introducing pretty far down into the article.

> "We can't forget that this is an armed group living under an extraordinary legal situation and that every six years they have to negotiate their position with a new government," said Emilio Zebadua, a PRD congressman from Chiapas. "Lopez Obrador can't be exempted from that, even though he is on the left."

This is the first quote in the article that I actually found interesting.

>Marcos also stepped up his public-relations campaign before the 2000 presidential election. And analysts note that the 1994 rebellion was staged just seven months before that year's presidential election.

It might have had something to do with it being the first day of Nafta too.