When the English amateur fooball team, Easton Cowboys, first discussed the possibility of organising a soccer tournament in a war zone in southern Mexico, the fear of a stray bullet proved less daunting than the prospect of strict dry laws imposed inside rebel villages. "It became known as the Betty Ford tour," quipped Roger, an original Cowboy, speaking last Saturday in Morelia, a small Chiapas village where the oddest football squad in the world squared up against rebellious peasant farmers in the Lacandon jungle.
This strange encounter was made possible by the January 1994 Zapatista uprising, when thousands of armed rebels declared war on the Mexican government, renewing a struggle for land and autonomy rights which dates back five centuries.
The uprising struck a chord with the Easton Cowboys, an anarchist football team based in Easton, a working-class area of Bristol. The area has a large population of Asians, Jamaicans and Somalians, alongside a blow-in army of punks and squatters.
Training sessions are conducted largely from the safety of bar stools in the Plough, the team's beloved local pub, where strenuous pint-pulling strengthens muscles and loosens tongues. The players' distrust of authority has left them without a captain or a manager, or even a consistent line-up.
However, the club's 200 members manage to field three local league teams, plus an under-12 selection, while the children have formed their own social sub-committee called FECK, (the Friends of Easton Cowboys Kid's Club).
Somehow, they made it to Mexico, thousands of miles from home, barely a word of Spanish between them, defying tropical heat, dengue-carrying mosquitos, Montezuma's revenge and Mexico's vigilant migration officers.
On the day the squad arrived in Chiapas, a front-page story in Mexico's main daily paper denounced the presence of "guerrilla tourists" in the region, "shrouded in a veil of revolutionary romanticism".
The Mexican law which prohibits foreigners from getting involved in political affairs has been strictly enforced in recent years, resulting in more than 200 expulsion orders.
The Mexican army set up camps next to rebel villages in 1995. The villagers in turn invited hundreds of foreign observers to set up makeshift camps alongside them, to monitor persistent harassment of besieged communities.
In Morelia, the English squad faced one team called the Three Martyrs of January 7th, recalling three villagers tortured and disappeared by the Mexican army in 1994, in revenge for the uprising.
The situation has improved slightly since Mexican President Vicente Fox took office last December, ending 71 years of one-party rule. Fox has made peace in Chiapas, the benchmark of his promise to transform Mexico into a tolerant, multi-ethnic democracy.
Last week, however, pressure from business leaders forced him to backtrack on measures aimed at reopening dialogue with the rebel leadership, which is a major setback to peace hopes.
The Easton Cowboys found a loophole in the migration law, which excludes sporting events from travel regulations. As members of the Gloucester Football Association, the Cowboys obtained a letter from FIFA, the governing world football body, which accredited them as legitimate sports people on an authorised mission.
The team members work as carpenters, roadies, stress managers, chefs and other jobs, all paying their own way to Mexico. Ben, a self-styled "guerrilla gardener", who applies his expertise in permaculture methods to British highways and shopping centres, was inadvertently financed by Bristol's police force, after a Bristol court awarded Ben damages for wrongful arrest arising from a direct action protest.
When the team lined up in Morelia for the first game of the tournament, play was delayed by an unburied water pipe on the pitch, as the village's supply line ran across the football field. It was an appropriate coincidence, as the visiting team raised several thousand pounds to pay for the installation of the community water system.
The first game took off at a frantic pace under a cruel sun: the Zapatistas relying on stamina rather than technique, running like crazy after the ball and wearing down the enemy. The locals faced a terrific imbalance in the air, as the members of the English team stood at least a foot taller than them. The first game saw an easy victory for the visiting team, who won two games and lost one, thus qualifying for the final.
The Cowboys' tour kicked off in La Realidad, the location of Zapatista army headquarters, where the visiting team found 12 teams waiting for them, twice the number expected. In addition, the village unearthed a microphone and recruited Esteban, the Zapatistas' answer to Eamon Dunphy, to perform a running commentary. It proved an integral part of the show.
One squad walked six hours through the jungle to play a game, sacrificing a valuable day's work in the cornfield. "Once people heard the Ingleses (English) were coming, they trained like mad," said one local.
The Cowboys suffered a remarkable range of injuries, from cracked ribs to scratched necks, bruised shins and sunstroke, as friendly games took on the air of a World Cup qualifying fixture, with five players forced to abandon play along the way.
The first casualty of the trip occurred 100 miles from the nearest football pitch, at the beach resort of Tulum, en route to Chiapas. After a night on the town, one player returned to his hotel room and was surprised to find it locked. He kicked in the door only to find a naked couple cowering beside their bed, one of them brandishing a large knife, ready for mortal combat with the intruder.
That was the end of his trip to Mexico.
"We try to sort out problems between ourselves," said Roger, who described the team as "an extended family", willing to lend a hand in tough times. Back home, the Cowboys sheltered a Mozambique refugee for two years while on another occasion, a woman facing eviction was saved from the street thanks to money raised on her behalf.
The team slogan is: "Join the Cowboys, make friends, find a partner, a job and a baby". Paul, a single parent with custody of Hannah, bears out the prophecy. Born in Cork, Hannah, aged 8, teaches games to the local children, fashioning broomsticks from local trees and running on to the pitch at half-time, to distribute oranges to the players.
Her father, who has a Master's degree in Soviet Studies, was initially sceptical about visiting another socialist country. "It seems to work though," he said, pointing to Morelia's co-operative shops, collective crops and joint decision-making process, conducted through regular village assemblies.
The footballers left their mark wherever they went, thanks to the artistic skill of Robin Banks, awarded Artist of the Year by Britain's Face magazine. "Freedom Through Football", the Cowboy's slogan, now adorns the walls in several communities.
Earlier this month, Mexico's Foreign Minister, Jorge Castaneda, called the nation's entire diplomatic corps together and instructed them to "make Mexico fashionable" after six years of negative publicity.
The diplomats could do worse than study the history of the Zapatista movement, which has skillfully connected with everyone from Oliver Stone and Bianca Jagger to Nobel Prize winners Jose Saramago and Rigoberta Menchu, and US rockers, Rage Against the Machine. The marketing manager of Benetton once stopped by, asking permission to use images of masked rebels in a publicity campaign. He was refused.
The Cowboys won the final 2-1, and finished the tour exhausted but inspired, promising to return next year. The communities returned to their cornfields, turning their attention back to the low intensity warfare which marks the passage of each day.
Website: www.zapatistas.org/links/