A ROW of bare yellow light-bulbs lit up the muddy, earth dancefloor in La Garrucha, south-east Mexico, last weekend, where 3,000 Zapatista rebels gathered to celebrate the biggest new year party ever held by a guerrilla army in Latin America.
This featureless, dispersed community, where children and pigs cohabit, where malnutrition and infantmortality overtake population growth, was transformed into a Blackpool-in-thejungle.
Rebel sympathisers had trucked in swings, park benches, heart-shaped balloons, fireworks and even a top dance combo from San Cristobal, Los Kevins, akin to the Sawdoetors playing in Kilburn, London.
The musicians watched nervously as spotter planes flew overhead, their upbeat dance tunes enlivened by an unexpected dose of fear.
The women gathered early, wearing the finest threads that extreme poverty permits, their bright yellow skirts, pink hairbands and spotless white shirts a sharp contrast to the inevitable bare feet.
A soup-kitchen fed beans, corn tortillas and coffee to the crowd, who lost no time in finding dance partners, dancing a reserved, ritual two-step, closer to Irish set dancing than the sensual salsa beat associated with Latin America. Couples hold hands at most, rarely speaking.
The rebels came by cattle truck, horse, canoe and foot, over mountains and across rivers, dodging thousands of Mexican troops and tanks as helicopters circled overhead, despite a prior agreement not to interfere.
The party was repeated in Morelia, La Realidad and Oventic, four new "Aguascalientes 2", to replace the original Aguascalientes (hot waters), a jungle meeting place which was levelled by the army last February.
In a lengthy communique read by a rebel commander, the Zapatistas then announced the formation of a political wing of the Zapatista National Liberation Front, inviting civil society and citizens without political representation to join forces and defeat Mexico's ruling Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI), which has spent 65 years in power.