Warren Murphy - Unite and Conquer

At the appointed hour, he showed up in a jungle clearing, wearing his black ski mask, his pipe redolent of cannabis-a harmless affectation from his former bourgeois existence. Five bandana-masked Juarezistas surrounded him, fingers on triggers, dark, moody eyes alert.

The questions pelted Antonio like cast stones.

"Are you a comunista?"

"Never!"

"You are indigena?"

"With these eyes? No, I am not indigena."

"Then why do you wage revolution?"

Antonio hesitated. He had prepared for this struggle for so long, the rote worker's slogans almost rose up from his throat even though they no longer had meaning. He swallowed them.

"I fight," he said after taking a long suck on his pipe, "I fight because this has been the struggle of my family for many generations."

The reporters frowned. They understood revolution, insurrections. But this was new.

At that point Antonio blurted out the flowery romantic words to cover the tracks that might lead to the Arcila family. But the journalistas were not satisfied with this.

"Tell us more," one invited.

"I am not the first Subcomandante Verapaz. My father was Subcomandante Verapaz before me. And my grandfather, his father, was Subcomandante Verapaz, stretching back I cannot tell how many generations. We took up the cause of righteousness, and consecrated our lives to it. In the name of all oppressed indigenous peoples, Subcomandante Verapaz wages war against oppression."

"Are you sure you aren't a comunista?"

"I have denied this. I am but the Verapaz of this generation. When I fall-and all my forebears eventually fell to their foes-my son will take up my gun and my mask and he will be the next Subcomandante Verapaz. Thus, I am unkillable and will never die."

At that point, camera flashbulbs began popping. His Juarezista bodyguards almost shot the head off a reporter until Antonio interceded.

The video cameras whirred, their glassy, greenish lenses capturing the dashing masked figure whose manly chest was crossed by bandoliers evocative of the romantic Mexican revolutionaries of the past.

When the press conference was over, Antonio melted back into his jungle cave, that night burning his black ski mask because he knew it was to death to wear it again. All Mexico would know him after this night.

It became truer than Antonio could ever envision.

His face was telecast throughout the world. His muffled head, jutting pipe and trademark soulful green eyes adorned magazine covers from Mexico City to Singapore.

He began to understand when more and more reporters came to visit him. At first he turned them all away. The revolution had sputtered out ignominiously. Chiapas was cordoned off, all escape routes blocked so that no criollo with green eyes could pass through alive. And besides that, he had no concealing Subcomandante Verapaz mask.

The entreaties continued to be carried to his jungle stronghold. Farmers by day who had been Juarezistas by night, bore the magazines with their glowing articles.

"You are a hero in Mexico City," he was told.

"What?"

"It is said, my lord, the women all adore you. There are toys bearing your likeness. Masks are sold and worn proudly. The students in the universities make speeches in your name. Pipe smoking is all the rage."

"Increible," he muttered, reading furiously.

But it was true. The romantic fantasy he had spun had been accepted as truth. He was no longer a failed, causeless revolutionary, but a cultural hero to modern Mexicans. Just like Zapata or Villa or Kukulcan.

"What shall we convey to these reporters?" his right hand, a Mayan guerrillero named Kix, had asked.

"Tell them," proclaimed Alirio Antonio Arcila, aka Lord Kukulcan, aka Subcomandante Verapaz, "that in return for one dozen black ski masks, I will agree to another press conference."

The masks arrived with astonishing alacrity. Antonio took one, with a knife slashing a hole for his pipe stem, and then distributed the remainder among his companeros.

"From now on, we will all be Subcomandante Verapaz," he proclaimed.

And his Maya wept with pride, never imagining that by donning these masks, they greatly increased the odds that one of them would take an assassin's bullet intended for their leader.

The press conferences became a monthly ritual. Money poured in. Arms. Supplies of other kinds. A revolution that might have been recorded by history as the last sputtering gasp of Third World Communist insurgency was reborn as the first truly indigenous revolution of the century.

Learned articles and dissertations were penned to analyze the phenomenon of a spontaneous revolution with no political or social entity motivating it. The first postmodern revolution, the New York Times dubbed it.

And no one suspected the true leader of all the Juarezistas who continued to fight and spill their blood in the sacred cause of furthering Alirio Antonio Arcila's celebrity-and incidentally forestalling the hated day he would return to the family coffee plantation and concede to his despised father that he had been right all along.

The successes came often after that. Minor skirmishes were hailed in the press as major engagements. When the old president of Mexico was chased from power, it was hailed as a Juarezista victory. When his handpicked successor was assassinated after expressing veiled pro-Juarezista sentiments, it lent legitimacy to the cause. And when a new, more liberal candidate replaced him, it was also seen as a Juarezista victory.

Every advance for the people and setback for the lawful government was viewed in the light of a handful of Maya pistoleros led by the unemployed son of a coffee grower, and although no true progress was made on the battlefield, the mere fact that Subcomandante Verapaz struggled on despite every attempt to capture or kill him added luster to the growing legend.

In the end the federal government declared a unilateral cease-fire and offered to engage in peace talks. They would never give Subcomandante Verapaz any political concessions, of course. But in declaring a one-sided peace, they signaled that Verapaz had grown too great to stop with mere bullets. In death, he could only grow more powerful. He would be left alone if he caused no problems so great it threatened Mexico City.

But Antonio had not spent ten years in the jungle eating bad tortillas and drinking stagnant water only to spend the rest of the century doing so. Ignoring the peace talks, he stepped up his campaign of words and communiques.

When he had forced the current governor of Chiapas to step down on behalf of a man whom he had blessed, Antonio began to consider the possibility that while he might never conquer Mexico, it was perhaps possible to seize a measure of political control of events beyond Chiapas.

The advent of the Great Mexico City Earthquake all but made that an inevitability.

After all, he was no longer Alirio Antonio Arcila now. Nor really Subcomandante Verapaz. He was Lord Kukulcan, a god sheathed in flesh who had united the polyglot peoples of Mexico in their blind hero-worshiping.

And most rewarding of all, it was tacitly acknowledged in the capital that it would be politically unacceptable to exterminate the people's hero.

The road of conquest had been swept clear.

Chapter 12

As he followed his god through the cracked and broken streets of Mexico City, Rodrigo Lujan had stripped off the confining necktie. He did not care that the streets lay buckled and cracked all around. Nor that mighty office towers tilted and shed their faces like so many false masks. They were the past. He walked with the future. He walked with serpentskirted Coatlicue whose remorseless tread seemed to make the Valley of Mexico shudder under her petrifying tread.

Let no one say the word aftershock. It was Coatlicue, also called Tonantzin-Our Mother-who made the very ground tremble.