Subcommander Marcos and Detective Fiction: The Case of Mexico’s Mysterious Masked Man

Abstract

The paper focuses on Mexican guerrilla leader and global rebel icon Subcommander Marcos, and in particular on his acquaintance with and affinity for detective fiction. More specifically, it explores his exposure to the genre and the influence it had upon him; his references to it in his communiqués; and his relationship with the detective novelists Manuel Vázquez Montalbán from Spain and Paco Ignacio Taibo II from Mexico. This study examines numerous communiqués and oral presentations by the Subcommander that mention Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories as well as Marcos and Taibo II’s co-authored highly-political crime novel, The Uncomfortable Dead. This novel, which represents Marcos’s longest piece of unified prose-writing and features his literary creation, the indigenous detective Elías Contreras, exhibits certain shared preoccupations on the part of Marcos, Montalbán and Taibo: namely, the detrimental impact of neoliberal globalisation, and the importance of historical memory in combatting it. Finally, the paper explores the factors that led Marcos to employ a crime novel as a major vehicle for conveying his socially inclusive, pro-indigenous, pro-ecology, pro-democracy, pro-female empowerment, pro-LGBTQ, anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal globalisation political philosophy.