Lucio Cabañas

Lucio Cabañas Barrietas (? - 1974) was a Mexican schoolteacher who became a left-wing revolutionary. Cabañas regarded Emiliano Zapata as his model.

He was born December 12, 1938 in El Porvenir , of Atoyac de Álvarez . He became politically active when he studied in Guerrero Normal and was a leader of the local student union. In 1962 he was elected to the post of General Secretary of the Federation of Socialistic Peasant Students of Mexico. When he began to work as a teacher, he also mediated in problems in other schools.

When a rector of Juan Álvarez school in Atoyac demanded that all pupils should wear a school uniform, Cabañas argued that some of the families were so poor they could hardly feed their children, not to mention buy them uniforms. The rector was fired but his supporters remained. When a May 18, 1967 strike action ended in shooting and deaths, he fled to the mountains and joined the group of Genaro Vásques Rojas until Rojas' death on February 2 1972.

Cabañas led a guerilla group, the Army of the Poor and Peasant's Brigade Against Injustice. They numbered perhaps 300 members and lived in the Guerrero Mountains . He financed his group by kidnappings and bank robberies.

There are also number of legends about him, including that he had five women bodyguards and that he had a bag full of money to give to the poor.

The Mexican government sent 16,000 soldiers to the Sierra Madre de Atoyac Mountains to hunt him. Fifty of them died during the chase.

In December 1974 Cabañas kidnapped Rubén Figueroa , governor of Guerrero. When government troops tried to rescue the governor, Cabañas died in the firefight.