Mexico was abuzz with expectation at the weekend as the long march of the Zapatista leadership began in south-east Mexico, taking 24 rebel comandantes through 12 Mexican states in the next two weeks.
Inside Zapatista territory hundreds of rebel villages declared an "orange alert", stepping up security measures in case of a catastrophe en route.
"This is what we were chosen for," said Comandante Zebedeo, as he packed his bags in a jungle hideaway. "We're not about to chicken out."
Mr Zebedeo is one of several dozen indigenous comandantes, the elected delegates of the Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee (CCRI), the Zapatista political authority, representing six ethnic peoples grouped in the movement.
At the rebel departure point last Saturday, thousands of villagers brought offerings of corn, coffee, beans and honey, sang the Zapatista anthem and raised the Mexican tricolour, the Zapatistas' own black flag with red star, and a new white flag, representing civil society and the struggle for peace.
In Ocosingo, a rancher stronghold in Chiapas, 300 taxis lined the road, honking horns in support of the rebels, while teachers waved flags, accompanied by hundreds of schoolchildren.
Tension has increased throughout Chiapas in the days preceding the march, as anti-Zapatista paramilitaries displaced a dozen rebel families while wealthy ranchers, their lands occupied by Zapatista sympathisers, threatened to block the convoy.
In addition investigators in the Tila region, in northern Chiapas, discovered the hastily buried remains of three Zapatista villagers killed by paramilitaries in 1997.
Members of "Peace and Justice", a paramilitary gang set up to block the Zapatistas' political advance, said they would retaliate if any of their militants were detained over the findings.
However it is not just Chiapas ranchers and paramilitaries who fear the Zapatista convoy, but Mexico's political parties and the country's business leaders, apprehensive at the prospect of an emerging non-partisan left which might unite Mexico's disaffected majority.
The meagre left-wing vote in last July's presidential elections dealt a severe blow to the centre-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which failed to capitalise on dissatisfaction with the ruling party.
Mr Jesus Zambrano, general secretary of the PRD, this week described the Zapatistas as "ungrateful" for failing to throw their weight behind his party's electoral ambitions.
The Zapatistas responded by accusing the PRD of tolerating the "same vices" that have plagued Mexico's political parties and insisted that the movement has no electoral aspirations.
The Zapatistas hope to consolidate their autonomy project through the implementation of the San Andres peace accord, signed in February 1996. The rebel delegates will address Mexico's Congress, hoping to convince them to vote the peace accord into law.