The voice of the group will now be Subcomandante Moises. Marcos will now be known as Subcomandante Galeano. (Galeano is intended to be a collective persona, a rebirth of a member of the group who was murdered earlier this month.) It's not clear if Moises will be the new leader, or just the new spokesperson. Marcos may be saying the group does not need a singular leader:

....“It is our belief and our practice that in order to rebel and struggle, we need neither leaders, nor caudillos, nor messiahs, nor saviors. ...."

[Added: Subcomandante Moises has now given this speech.]

My favorite Zapatista communique was one written years ago, in response to an article that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle quoting Marcos as saying he once worked in a restaurant in San Francisco, but was fired for being gay. The mainstream press in Mexico picked up the story and declared it scandalous that Marcos was a "queer revolutionary." The Zapatistas' response was "Subcommander Marcos is More Than Just Gay."

The Mexican Government has identified Marcos as Rafael Sebastian Guillen, and says he has a Masters Degree in Philosophy and used to teach at Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM) in Mexico City. Marcos has never confirmed this.

Marcos, who has rarely appeared in public in recent years, is always photographed with a black ski mask. He attended the recent funeral for Galeano, but before that his last major public appearance was in 2009. (In 2006, he announced he would be known as "Delegate Zero.")

Marcos mentions in his statement that he knows nothing about social media. Perhaps he is not riding off into the sunset, just ceding responsibility for the group's communications to those more in tune with today's preferred means of media communication.

So while he will no longer be known as Subcomandante Marcos, and Subcomandante Marcos will no longer be the voice of the Zapatistas, I hope we will still hear from him as "Subcomandante Galeano." Here's an excellent analysis of his announcement.

When the EZLN took five municipalities in Chiapas on January 1, 1994, the world came to know the mysterious masked Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos as its spokesperson.

...Seeing the fascination of the Mexican and international media with the mysterious persona of Marcos, the EZLN decided to take advantage and “use” this allure in order to attract more and more attention and stay in the spotlight.

The strategy was not without its costs, however. The catapulting forward of Marcos actually produced a boomerang effect: the movement became personalized in the persona of Marcos, and the biggest achievement of Zapatismo as such — the autonomous, leaderless communities — remained in the shadow. The EZLN realized that “the movement became Marcos” and “Marcos became the movement,” and they have long been trying to find a way to tackle that — to the extent that they even deliberately fuelled rumors of Marcos’ serious illness that circulated for the past few years.

....And that appears to be the real reason why Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos chose to cease to exist. Because now, in Chiapas, there are people who have learned how to govern themselves in an autonomous, horizontal way. There are children who have studied in autonomous schools, patients who have been treated in autonomous clinics, women who are no longer considered inferior to men. And all this should be known to the world without the distraction of the persona of Marcos.