Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2001 12:23:51 -0500
From: Chuck0 <chuck-AT-tao.ca>
Subject: Fwd: Freedom through Football/A la Libertad por el Futbol



The Irish Times, Saturday,
January 27, 2001
Playing cowboys and Indians
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'Freedom through football'
is the slogan of the anarchic English
football team which went to
play Zapatista rebels. ]
Michael McCaughan reports

When the English amateur
football 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 sportspeople 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 José 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/

THE COWBOY STORY
The Easton Cowboys began life
in the early 1990s as a group of
punks playing football in St
Paul's Estate in Bristol, fighting an
uphill battle to join a local
league. "Ever tried getting punks and
hippies up early on a Sunday
morning?" asked Roger, a former
British Aerospace worker, who
made contact with neighbouring
Asian and Jamaican teams.

The turning point for the
team came in 1993, when the Easton
Cowboys were invited to a
football festival in the Swabian
mountains, near Stuttgart in
Germany. "That opened our eyes,"
said Jasper, another player,
who discovered soccer's answer to
the Glastonbury festival.
Organisers erected a stage, hired
generators, put on bands and
a puppet shows for the kids. "They
did it all themselves,
without professional help," explained
Jasper.

By 1998, the team felt
confident enough to host an Alternative
World Cup, a non-profit event
with teams from France,
Germany, Ireland, Poland,
Belgium and Norway. The team
raised £10,000 to bring a
team from Soweto, South Africa, who
walked away with the trophy.
"After that, we felt like we
could do anything" said Roger, little
imagining the challenge that
lay halfway across the world.
The team members knew little
about the Zapatista movement,
but their curiosity was
awoken by reports from returned visitors.
"It seemed that their effort
to win back control of their lives
mirrored our struggle to stay
independent within the global
economic order," said Jasper.


====check out our web site at http://www.chiapaslink.ukgateway.net

_


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