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08/31/2005:

"At a 60's Style Be-In, Guns Yield to Words, Lots of Words"

SAN MIGUEL, Mexico, Aug. 28 - After four years of hiding, the charismatic leader of the Zapatista rebel movement in southern Mexico has been holding "town hall" meetings with leftists, labor leaders, students, Indian rights advocates and other supporters in an effort to forge a national campaign to rewrite Mexico's Constitution along socialist lines.

The rebel, who calls himself Subcommander Marcos, emerged from the woods on Sunday morning surrounded by 24 armed rebels for a second day of listening to the leaders of dozens of charities devoted to social work and human rights. All the rebels wore the movement's trademark black balaclava helmets, including Marcos, who may be the only man in history to make a ski mask and pipe look sexy.

The weekend gathering looked like a cross between the Woodstock concert, a Grange Hall meeting and a convention of Che Guevara fans. At times it looked as if a public hearing in the East Village had been transported to a horse pasture in the rugged green mountains here.

...The attendees included an organization representing lesbian anarchists, a collective of witches, advocates fighting the privatization of waterworks, gay-rights promoters who call themselves polysexuals and well-respected human rights monitors in Chiapas.
nytimes.com

ha ha ha. Very funny. Witches, polysexuals, and fighters for water privatization. What a loony bunch. This is the New York Times so so sophisticated take on blatant bias.