Uprising Leader

“Middle-Class Roots Tarnish Leader’s Image” is your headline (Feb. 11) referring to Subcommander Marcos (identified as Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente by the Mexican government). He is a major spokesman for the Indians who live in abject poverty in Chiapas, Mexico.

Why would being middle class tarnish his image? Practically all leaders in history have been “middle class” or from a class able to be mobile and have time away from a life of desperate survival for a better world.

Try Thomas Jefferson, Washington, Gandhi, Nehru, Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther King Jr.

More socially conscious middle-class citizens need to be “tarnished” with the democratic ideas of Marcos.

HASKELL WEXLER

Santa Monica

In Mexico the ruling party PRI is accused of stealing an election in Chiapas, which caused a peasant uprising, the peso to plummet, the Mexican government to escalate the military to a state of war, and also caused “concerned” investors to lobby for a bailout of the Mexican economy.

Meanwhile, back in the Chechen Republic, having followed a similar blueprint--injustice, local dissent, military intervention and massacre--we hear the same cries to bail out the Russian economy.

Wall Street may disagree, but you can’t bail out a morally sinking ship.

DOUGLAS ALAN HERMAN

Santa Monica

$49.8 billion for Mexico . . . but what for Orange County?

LARRY WASHBURN

Redondo Beach