Bad news for those of us with a congenital weakness for socially conscious
 rebels: Mexico's guerrilla leader Subcommander Marcos may prove to be
 something very different from a champion of democracy.

 You may remember that, when he led his Indian-supported 1994 Zapatista
 uprising in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas, the white-skinned guerrilla leader
 wearing a ski-mask to conceal his identity charmed the world with his claims to
 be fighting to topple the ``dictatorship'' that had ruled his country since 1929.

 Furthermore, even those of us who knew that Subcommander Marcos -- who
 turned out to be Rafael Sebastián Guillén, a Mexico City university professor --
 secretly belonged to the Maoist-inspired National Liberation Front guerrilla group
 could not help but admit to the possibility that he had evolved into a sincere
 fighter for democracy.

 When I interviewed Subcommander Marcos in the Lacandon jungle in mid-1994,
 he certainly tried to portray himself as a Robin Hood-style fighter for basic
 freedoms. He repeatedly told me that his goal was not to take power, but to
 accelerate political change.

 Asked about the early statements by his troops during the Jan. 1, 1994, uprising,
 he played down their calls for a socialist state. He said the main purpose of the
 Zapatista uprising was to oust the corrupt Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)
 ``dictatorship,'' which together with its friends in Mexico's business elite had
 become the main obstacles to social justice in Mexico, and particularly in
 Chiapas.

 Marcos' personality helped give his words some credibility. Unlike Cuba's Fidel
 Castro, he didn't talk with the pomposity of an aspiring world leader. Rather, he
 played the role of an anti-hero, a man who seduced his interviewers with casual
 talk and self-deriding humor.

 What would he do if, by some accident of history, he became Mexico's president,
 I asked him at the time. Marcos looked at me wide-eyed and smiled from behind
 his mask. ``What? Me, president of Mexico? You must be crazy! . . . I'm a
 guerrilla leader, a poet, a dreamer . . . [Mexico] would go down the drain.''

 Today, nearly six years later, it's time for Marcos to live up to his claim to be a
 democrat. Two key events in recent weeks have changed history in Mexico and in
 Chiapas, and the Zapatista leader's rhetoric would prove to be a farce if he doesn't
 react to them accordingly.

 On July 2, Mexicans broke with the PRI's seven-decade-old monopoly of power
 and elected opposition leader Vicente Fox as their next president. Fox, a former
 general manager of Coca Cola in Mexico, will take office Dec. 1 and is promising
 to lead a center-left government that will put special emphasis on reducing
 poverty.

 But even if Marcos wanted to argue that Fox's victory would not necessarily
 change things in Chiapas, the state on Aug. 20 elected Pablo Salazar as its first
 opposition governor in recent memory. Salazar was backed by a coalition of eight
 Chiapas opposition parties, and is close to Roman Catholic Church groups that
 have been close to the Zapatista rebels.

 Despite these key developments, the usually talkative Marcos has not said a
 word in public since the day of Fox's election.

 Was his claim to be fighting the PRI ``dictatorship'' a public relations strategy to
 seduce naive gringo reporters? What excuse could he possibly have now for not
 opening the doors to a peace settlement with the next government?

 Subcommander Marcos has the opportunity of his life: He could claim some
 credit for precipitating the political changes that led to the downfall of the PRI,
 take off his ski-mask, and renew his struggle for Mexico's Indians in the political
 arena.

 If he doesn't do that soon, he will prove once and for all that he never was an
 altruist ``dreamer,'' but just another guerrilla commander who was interested only
 in one thing: power.