Subcomandante Marcos Issues Anti-State Manifesto Framing Race, Migration, and Identity as Targets of a Global “Pyramid” System
Executive Summary
In a recent essay titled “One Continent, Many Colors,” Subcomandante Marcos—former spokesperson for Mexico’s Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN)—delivers a sweeping anti-colonial, anti-capitalist critique that links race, nationality, gender, and class oppression to a shared global structure of domination. Published by Abolition Media, the piece revives classic Zapatista rhetoric while escalating its ideological reach to a continental and planetary scale.
Analysis
Subcomandante Marcos, now known as “El Capitán,” uses this latest post on Abolition Media as both political allegory and explicit indictment of systemic structures that criminalize and exploit difference. The essay, deeply metaphorical yet politically pointed, casts the American continent—and by extension the world—as shaped by a stratified pyramid where identity becomes a marker for disposability. From Indigenous Chiapanecos to queer migrants in the U.S., Marcos asserts that state violence is consistently racialized, gendered, and economic.
The piece opens by evoking color as metaphor: yellowish-orange for the U.S., brown for migrants, red for Indigenous resistance. Marcos references U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and domestic policing as institutions driven by aesthetics—skin tone, language, food preferences, fashion—as proxies for criminality. By blending anecdotes of Zapatista history with U.S. enforcement practices (including recent reports on ICE’s use of AI-powered surveillance), Marcos collapses North and South into a unified geography of state repression and resistance.
He frames “citizenship” itself as a tool of erasure, designed not to empower but to homogenize, thereby dissolving difference into a façade of unity that enables ongoing exploitation. The critique extends beyond the U.S. and Mexico, calling out progressive governments across Latin America—Chile, Brazil, Argentina—for continued dispossession of Indigenous populations, and authoritarian regimes like El Salvador for turning incarceration into spectacle.
The climax of the piece is a multilingual rejection of hierarchy itself—“Fuck the pyramid”—written in over 40 languages, from Arabic to Korean to Basque. This global refrain emphasizes the Zapatistas’ longstanding internationalist stance: the pyramid is everywhere, but so are those willing to topple it.
Notably, Marcos offers no alternative blueprint. The essay ends on a speculative note—perhaps “a meeting of some parts of the whole will hint at an answer”—leaving readers with a challenge rather than a plan. It reflects a consistent Zapatista ethos: autonomous resistance over institutional reform, horizontalism over vanguardism.
From an intelligence perspective, this writing functions as ideological infrastructure. It doesn’t call for immediate action like other anarchist communiqués but frames a worldview that justifies and inspires decentralized resistance. For militant movements across the Americas and Europe, Marcos’ words serve as an affirmation of struggle rooted in historical trauma and cultural survival.
