The EZLN’s utopian soccer

When the Zapatistas emerge from the tunnel and step onto the pitch, the crowd breaks into a chant: “E-Zeta-Ele-Ene! E-Zeta-Ele-Ene!” Enthusiasm is overwhelming for a team of 11 diminutive men who arrive wearing their inevitable balaclavas and shorts and jerseys that are far too large for them. From the start the match is uneven. Soldiers of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) face a side of veteran Mexico footballers captained by Javier Aguirre, “El Vasco.” It is an unusual Monday, March 15, 1999. The event draws 6,000 people to the Jesús Martínez Palillo stadium in downtown Mexico City. Contemporary accounts say the Zapatistas were thin, dark-skinned and no taller than 1.65 meters, and they didn’t even warm up before the match. They were about to chase the ball in their military boots, but several fans sympathized and lent them pairs of sneakers.

They took the field without a clear strategy. Subcomandante Marcos, who did not play — to the disappointment of El Vasco — would later explain that the Zapatista formation was 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1, in which everyone goes where the ball is. The experience of the opposing team of veterans prevailed; they were former stars of the 1986 World Cup. When the first goal went in, the Reforma newspaper reporter noted wryly: “The Zapatistas, from kick-off, showed they’re weak on the right.” The team that came down from the mountains of Chiapas, born of the rage of Indigenous peoples excluded by modernity, lost 5-3. Although saying they “lost” may be inappropriate. The Zapatista mindset did not conceive victory as the besting of the rival. In their utopia, what mattered was being part of the game, the economy, the politics, the whole.

That is why they came to the capital: to promote a popular consultation on their right to self-determination, to denounce the relentless persecution by the government of Ernesto Zedillo and, above all, to be seen. It was said they could be detained and jailed at any point on their journey to Mexico City. “There was a very dirty campaign to label the Zapatistas as terrorists and murderers. They wanted to meet people to show who they really are: the Zapatistas don’t plant bombs, they play soccer; they don’t kidnap people, they hold dances, marches, theater,” explains sociologist and journalist Marta Durán, who has documented the EZLN for years.

Soccer, the sport with the largest following in Mexico, became their platform for outreach, even though they didn’t know the rules or how to play it (basketball is the most popular game in southeastern communities). One of the Zapatistas said at the end of that 1999 match: “I felt a lot of emotion, I felt the EZLN does have support in Mexico, I felt like running and continuing the struggle.” A player from the veterans’ team praised the Zapatistas’ indomitable spirit: “They run a lot, they commit themselves completely, they don’t give up, they go for everything.” After the defeat, Subcomandante Marcos wrote from his enclave in Chiapas: “We didn’t lose; we ran out of time to win (a Napoleonic phrase).” He listed several factors that affected his men’s performance, among them “those kits we could fit two of us into” (a relative of Aguirre’s designed their sportswear — black and white with a striking red star on the chest — but without taking measurements beforehand, guessing at bodies that were not those of the players). “Ah!” Marcos added. “And don’t forget the zapatudos arrived a little tired because they reached the DF [the old name of the Mexican capital] after dribbling past 70,000 federal troops.”

Durán notes that with the gate receipts from the match the Zapatistas bought a radio transmitter that three German engineers had smuggled into Mexico in bits to mislead the authorities, and then assembled in the mountains. That was the level of fear and repression at the time, but also of sympathy at home and abroad for the EZLN.

The Zapatistas’ relationship with soccer was more than publicity: they found fraternity in the game. One of the movement’s great allies was Inter Milan, which traveled to the heart of the Chiapas highlands in 2004, to Oventic, to bring money (€5,000 raised from fines the club imposed on players for arriving late to training or for using cell phones), medicine, an ambulance, balls, and kit to form a team. One of the most special gifts was an official Inter jersey of Argentine captain Javier Zanetti. The delegation returned to Italy with a letter from Subcomandante Marcos to Massimo Moratti, Inter’s president, in which the Zapatista leader challenged the Serie A giants to a match. “Given the affection we have for you, we are willing not to drown you in goals,” he promised. The Zapatistas also gave the Nerazzurri two trophies decorated with the figure of a masked footballer, Reforma reported.

Inter accepted Marcos’s challenge with the intention of helping to raise visibility for the movement. The club manager, Bruno Bartolozzi, spoke of the possibility of the match in metaphysical terms: “Hypothetically, 15 people could travel to Italy without anyone knowing, play the match without anyone knowing and return to Mexico without anyone knowing. The match could be filmed and released once the Zapatistas have returned to Chiapas.” The game never took place, but it’s possible to imagine how it might have played out. We know this because Subcomandante Marcos described the encounter on an imaginary pitch in a May 2005 letter.

The match, which would have been more of a tournament if it had taken place, would have been refereed by Diego Maradona, Jorge Valdano, El Vasco and Sócrates. It would have been commentated on by Eduardo Galeano and Benedetti, those “two intergalactics who travel with Uruguayan passports.” The Sub would have been the coach of the Zapatista “dream team,” because “no one else wanted to accept the job.” The cheerleaders would have been performers from “the national lesbian-gay community, especially travestis and transsexuals.” If possible, there would have been seven matches in Mexico, the United States, Cuba (in front of Guantánamo), the Basque Country and Italy, although if that proved difficult, two — home and away — would have sufficed in the countries of the two teams. The Zapatista side would have requested reinforcements from Bofo Bautista and Marigol Domínguez, champions of the era — “and they would accept the Sub’s call; Bofo would even play with the balaclava,” Marcos said.

The ticket revenue, if that tournament had not remained a flight of fancy, would have been destined for Indigenous displaced people in the Highlands of Chiapas, where paramilitaries linked to Zedillo’s government carried out a massacre in 1997 in Acteal; another portion of the funds would have been given to the defense of activists detained in Mexico and to lawyers for migrants in the U.S. The trophy would have been a traditional bowl for serving pozol, an ancestral drink from the Chiapas region.

Security conditions were among the reasons Inter ultimately decided not to go ahead. In 2005, the Zapatistas still lived under siege by the army and paramilitary groups, while continuing to deepen the autonomy of their own institutions, such as the Caracoles, the name they gave to their community centers. One of the best-known Caracoles has a paradoxically literary name: La Realidad. Although the tournament did not happen, the relationship with Inter continued through a campus program that took coaches and some players to low-resource communities. One of those camps was held at the Caracol in Morelia.

The departures of Moratti and some Latin American players from Inter such as Juan Sebastián Verón, Walter Samuel or Iván Zamorano, as well as captain Zanetti, cooled the relationship. For Andrea Zegna, a Milan journalist who has long followed the club’s connection to the Zapatistas, these players had “a certain political conscience; above all, they sympathized with national liberation and anti-colonial causes.” It was a generation still marked by the political mythology of the 20th century. Verón, for example, had Che Guevara tattooed on his arm.

The EZLN, if nothing else, had the patience of rocks. In 2021 they boarded a ship and made a 47-day crossing to Europe. Five centuries had passed since the arrival of the Spanish conquerors in the Americas, and the Zapatistas were making the voyage in reverse, to discover Europe. After disembarking in Germany, the EZLN women’s team, called Ixchel Ramona, wanted to play a match against St. Pauli’s women‘s side, the world’s most punk — which is to say the most progressive and left-leaning — club. That match, however, also did not take place.

That was soccer for the Zapatistas: another utopia. Marcos imagined a wrenching scene for the imaginary 2005 match, which he described in his letter. The imagery should be read with the cadence of a sports reporter: “After protesting to the referee the illegitimacy of the conceded goal, [the Sub] places the ball at the center of the field. He turns to look at his teammates and they exchange glances and silences. With the score, the sports books, and the whole system against them, no one holds any hope for the Zapatistas. It begins to rain. A clock shows it is almost six. Everything seems ready for the match to resume…” Or perhaps, as Bartolozzi suggested, the match did take place, but nobody knew about it except them.

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