Laying a ghost to rest: Subcommander Marcos' playing of the indigenous card

One particular claim against the Zapatista spokesman and military leader, Subcommander Marcos, has remained in circulation for at least a decade. This is the claim that Marcos calculatingly played the indigenous card to win sympathy for the Zapatistas after having discovered howthis aspect of the uprising had caught theworld's attention. This scenario has been proposed by severalwell-respected journalists and a professor of anthropology. Here, I argue against this interpretation by drawing on interviews with the Subcommander dating to the first day of the Zapatista rebellion to demonstrate that the claim is counterintuitive and ignores overwhelming evidence to the contrary.