King of the jungle

When Sub commander Marcos went to the Chiapas jungle and joined a group of armed rebels in August 1983, he carried a dozen books in his backpack. Among them were novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortazar, much to the amusement of his fellow rebels who insisted he also carry his share of bullets, food and equipment.

One by one the books were left behind, as the 27-year-old city kid learned the first rule of life in the guerrilla: "One kilo weighs two after an hour. After two hours, it weighs four and you just want to dump the whole f--king lot."

Marcos's skill in bringing books to life around the campfire led to a change of heart among his companions. "Every time I left a book behind, someone would offer to carry it for me. `A story is going to come out of that', they would say." Marcos was soon in demand as a rent-a-scribe, writing letters for his lovesick companeros. "Tell me what to say to this woman so she'll fall in love with me," they pleaded.

Ten years later Subcomandante Marcos appeared to the rest of the world when he led an armed uprising by Zapatista rebels on January 1st 1994, seizing the tourist town of San Cristobal de las Casas and shaking Mexico's one-party political system to its roots. The government moved swiftly to capture the masked rebel, drawing up a rough approximation of a man of "25 years, clean-shaven with big hazel-coloured eyes, a prominent nose, speaks two languages". Mexican women sat up and began to pay attention.

Police and army troops arrested and imprisoned "Marcos" in two different towns on the same day, identified him as a Venezuelan bird-watcher, an alcoholic bricklayer and a 66-year-old priest who had spent the previous two years in hospital recovering from a car crash.

A week later Marcos was pronounced dead, only to be resurrected and captured as "foreign agitator", Marcos Rojas, a Mexican who fought with the Sandinistas in the Nicaraguan revolution. The myth grew.

The Zapatistas took their name and inspiration from independence hero, Emiliano Zapata, a Zapotec Indian who fought for land and freedom during Mexico's first revolution in 1910. The neoZapatistas' short-lived military attack was followed by a more sustained literary strike, as Marcos retreated to his jungle HQ and sent a stream of communiques to the national media, who doubled circulation when they printed the rebel message in full.

Marcos anticipated his own death during the doomed uprising but found he had been granted a stay of execution and now felt he was "living on borrowed time". A torrent of writings followed - scraps of songs and poems, references to soap operas, the Beatles, Shakespeare and Neruda, an uncontrollable stream of consciousness born of the miracle of being alive.

Marcos's writings blended allegoric folk tales with sharp political satire, drawing on the indigenous wisdom learned during the years spent among the Indian communities. One recurring character was "Old Antonio", a wise elder who passed on advice and wisdom to the impatient guerrilla leader.

The Marcos letters acted as a crucial bridge between "profound" Mexico - of indigenous custom and communal identity - and "imaginary" Mexico, of credit cards, factories and Hollywood films.

"Facing the mountains we speak to our dead so that their words will guide us along the path that we must walk. The drums sound and in the voices of the land we hear our pain and our history." (Second Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, June 1994).

When the first round of rebel government talks ended in March 1994, Marcos staggered out of San Cristobal's Cathedral under the weight of 2,000 letters sent to him from every corner of Mexico, from laid-off oil workers to smitten senoritas, and even an eight-year-old girl wondering how she could become Marcos's "subcommander-ess".

Along with the fanmail came the dolls, socks, t-shirts, posters and even "condoms for an uprising" which sold out as fast as they appeared.

OCTAVIO Paz, Mexico's Nobel laureate and a highly conservative statesman, recognised Marcos's "imaginative and lively prose" which had "easily won the war of opinions". The French intellectual, Regis Debray, trecked into the jungle and vouched for Marcos, ranking him the greatest living writer in Latin America. Carlos Fuentes exchanged letters with him, while the king of magical realism, Garcia Marquez, acknowledged that events in Mexico made him want to "throw his books into the sea". It was hardly news when this year's Nobel literature prize-winner, Jose Saramago, announced he would dedicate his remaining years to the Zapatista cause.

The Zapatista headquarters looked like Studio 54 at times, with Oliver Stone prowling the undergrowth on horseback, Danielle Mitterrand chatting to locals about the Kurds, or the Benetton PR chief hunched over a campfire, waiting to find out if the rebels would agree to an ad campaign. They didn't. When Bianca Jagger turned up she was refused entry as she arrived with Roberto Torricelli, a US democrat who lent his name to an embargo-tightening law against Cuba.

The master of ceremonies was the pipe-smoking Marcos, while the indigenous authority, the Clandestine Revolutionary Committee (CCRI), stayed in the background, happy to have a fluent, eloquent Spanish-speaker taking care of PR.

After yet another round of who-is-Marcos questions by journalists, the rebel revealed his identity: "Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa, Palestinian in Israel, Jewish in Germany, a woman alone in the metro at 10 p.m., a landless peasant, all the minorities searching for a word, their word, which would make a majority out us, the eternally fragmented ones".

In February 1995 the Mexican army advanced against rebel positions, with Marcos narrowly avoiding capture when army helicopters almost landed on the roof of his jungle hut. The next communique was a diary extract, in which he described how he threw up after drinking his urine in the jungle and how Eva, a five-year-old local, was going to kill him for leaving her copy of The Jungle Book behind in the panicky exit. This was a far cry from Che Guevara's epic Bolivian diary.

On a visit to rebel villages, this journalist heard talk of a children's book, written by Marcos, about the history of colours, which circulated by hand from village to village. In the book, Marcos lights up his trademark pipe, sits down beside village elder Antonio, and a story unfolds, about how mythical gods grew tired of the universe, because it was tinted only in grey. The gods held a meeting and agreed to look for more colours. The first colour, red, was discovered after one god tripped up and split his head open with a stone.

"Another god was looking for colours when he heard a child laughing," wrote Marcos. "He snuck up on the child, snatched his laugh and left him in tears. That's why they say that children can be laughing one minute and all of a sudden they are crying. The god stole the child's laugh and they called this seventh colour yellow." When the gods went to sleep they pinned the seven colours to the tail of the macaw bird so that they would remember where they had left them.

The story was published by a worker's collective in nearby Oaxaca state, who then passed it on to a bilingual US publisher, Cinco Puntos, based in El Paso, Texas. The Story of Colours was translated into English and published last March, with the pledge of a grant by the US National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

Cinco Puntos press is a shoestring operation, publishing bilingual books, many of them with border themes. The Colours book cost US$15,000 to print, with the NEA grant paying half of the cost. Marcos appeared in a photo on the inside flap, while Indigo Girls singer Amy Ray wrote the back cover blurb.

When NEA chairman William J. Ivey saw the book, he cancelled the grant, saying he feared some of the royalties might end up in the hands of armed rebels in Mexico. Bobby Byrd, co-director of Cinco Puntos press, dismissed the claim as ridiculous, as he had already agreed that no part of the money would go to Marcos, who does not believe in copyright and had formally waived his rights in prior talks.

The publishers feel that the NEA got cold feet after reading the text, which includes references to love-making and smoking, which are frowned upon in conservative US circles. Ivey denied that the content of the book had anything to do with the decision to cancel funding. The controversy did no harm to book sales, as the first print run, of 5,000, sold out within three days. The book is now in its third edition, with 17,000 copies sold.

The Story of Colours concludes with the iridescent macaw strutting about the world, "just in case men and women forget how many colours there are and how many ways of thinking, and that the world will be happy if all the colours and ways of thinking have their place".

The Story Of Colours will be published in the UK in the Autumn