Comandante Ramona, a leader of Mexico’s Zapatista rebel movement has died after a long struggle with a kidney disease. Zapatista leader Marcos, said: “The world has lost one of those women it requires. Mexico has lost one of the combative women it needs and we, we have lost a piece of our heart.”
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Among the indigenous commanders there is a tiny woman, even tinier than those around her. A face wreathed in black still leaves the eyes free and a few hairs dangling from the head. In that gaze is the glitter of one who searches. A 12 calibre sawed-off shotgun hangs from her back. With the traditional dress of the women from San Andres, Ramona walks down from the mountains, together with a hundred more women, towards the city of San Cristobal on that last night of 1993. 
Together with Susana and other indigenous men she is part of that indian command of the war which birthed 1994, the Candestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee-General Command of the EZLN. Comandante Ramona will, with her size and her brilliance, surprise, the international press when she appears during the first Dialogues for Peace held in the Cathedral and pulls from her backpack the national flag re- taken by the Major on January 1st. Ramona does not know then, nor do we, but she already carries in her body an illness which eats her life away in huge bites and dims her voice and her gaze. Ramona and the Major, the only women in the Zapatista delegation who show themselves to the world for the first time declare: “For all intents and purposes we were already dead, we meant absolutely nothing” and with this they almost count the humiliation and abandonment. The Major translates to Ramon the questions of the reporters. Ramona nods and understands, as though the answers she is asked for had always been there, in that tiny figure which laughs at the Spanish language and at the ways of the city women. Ramona laughs when she does not know she is dying. And when she knows, she still laughs. Before she did not exist for anyone, now she exists, as a woman, as an indigenous woman, as a rebel woman. Now Ramona lives, a woman belonging to that race which must die in order to live…
see Twelve Women in the Twelfth Year
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