Juan Sebastián Verón and The Beautiful Game
As I make the decision to re-commit myself to blogging after a rather long hiatus, I am blasting a song fom Bersuit Vergarabat titled “La argentinidad al palo”, which roughly translates into something that… I can’t even translate.
The song highlights countless Argentine claims, icons and contradictions, ranging from the invention of the bus to the ironic suicide of historian and surgeon Dr. René Favaloro, who created the coronary bypass surgery technique. Through no fault of his own, Favaloro’s foundation was in deep debt by 2000, during an already crippling national economic crisis. He was dismayed at recent layoffs and at the possibility of having to slow down his research. After he was repeatedly ignored by a degenerate government, the doctor shot himself in the heart, but not before writing a scathing suicide note, calling government officials a group of corrupt politicians who live at the cost of the workers and steal public funds.
The song, “La argentinidad al palo”, is replete with references to fútbol, and even makes mention of the the bloody coup that was ruling during Argentina’s at-home World Coup victory in 1978. Millions of dollars were stolen, borrowed and spent to rehabilitate stadiums and erect luxury hotels and hospitality centers. There was plenty of dirty money behind the scenes as well: during the semis, Argentina had to beat Peru by at least four goals in order to make it to the finals. The final score favored Argentina 6-0. Thirty years later, the son of a powerful Colombian drug lord would claim that his family helped fix the game through tens of millions of dollars supplied by the military junta.
Whether or not the junta attended a meeting in Peru to bribe the team into losing, what remains certain is that (Nobel-Prize Winning) Henry Kissinger was in Argentina during the 1978 World Coup, bolstering strong US support for a dictatorship that would claim the lives of some 30,000 mostly young women and men. As the country won the World Cup, millions of Argentines waved flags and somewhat unwittingly aided the junta in fomenting nationalism through popular sentiment. This sense of nationalism protected a murderous regime: political prisoners held at ESMA in Buenos Aires City say they remember not only the screams inside from their fellow prisoners who were being tortured, but also the screams outside from Argentina’s fans during and after the final game against Holland. Fútbol, like torture, it seems, permeates everything in Argentina. And although I am not old enough to remember the 1978 World Coup, I did grow up during the dictatorship that followed, and had family members on what was then the losing side of resistance, who faced their own terrifying consequences as a result of their convictions.
Yet every four years, I become a fanatical proxy nationalist. I choose to ignore the way a right-wing fascist dictatorship used an international sporting event as part of their campaign to disappear loved ones. I write off that the ‘78 game may have been fixed, and I forget the fact that my family comes from Paraguay and Brazil, or that each branch of government is just as nasty and corrupt as it was in 1978 or in 2000, when Favaloro killed himself. More than anything else, I suspend my suspicion of nationalism so much, that I embrace it and hold it tight. As I mentioned to an Irish ex-pat friend in a correspondence yesterday, I lose sleep, make agreements with a higher power, and even catch myself humming parts of the national anthem. In the past few weeks, I felt even more motivated towards my team, since Argentina faced the possibility of not making it to the World Cup this year. Although, considering our briberous past, it’s likely a corporate sponsor would have muscled a way in for Argentina to participate: FIFA’s main sponsor is Adidas, the result of a contract secured by FIFA’s Senior Vice President Julio Grondona — who just happens to be the President of the Argentine Fútbol Association as well. Lionel Messi, arguably the world’s best player and certainly Adidas’s most valuable contract player, plays on Argentina’s national team. Between Grondona, FIFA, and Adidias, I find it highly unlikely that Argentina would not have somehow made it to the World Cup.
I am currently in Phoenix, a place where I have yet to meet anyone from South America, much less from Argentina. Because I haven’t found a sports bar that has aired any of Argentina’s qualifying matches, I’ve found myself watching them online by myself. I’ve cried by myself through games with Brazil and Paraguay in September. I was thrilled and celebrated our recent victory against Peru by jumping up and down, alone, on this seat at a desk. Yet yesterday’s game against Uruguay was the most significant, because the win automatically (and legitimately) qualified us for a spot in South Africa. The game was considered so important that local residents in Gualeguaychú, Argentina, who have shut down the international bridge that connects to Uruguay in protest of the World Bank-funded, Finnish-owned and highly-polluting Botnia paper pulp mill, decided to open the route for the first time in two years to allow some 2,500 fans to cross for the game. World Cup games, and in this case, qualifiers, change everything. As midfielder Juan Sebastián Verón (seen above) claimed, this wasn’t a celebration, it was a relief.
Because I watch the games online, the feed is sometimes dropped due to a copyright violation, so I find myself watching feeds not from my own country, but hateful feeds with venomous announcers — particularly from Brazil and England, who find any reason to desecrate Argentina. It makes my isolation here even more isolating. The defensiveness heightens my sense of being Argentine, and adds additional specks of ultra-nationalism. I cried when I saw coach Diego Maradona cry, and in that instant realized how much I want to be back home again.
In the hours that followed after the win, I turned to my favorite Argentine paper to try to share in the joy I felt so far away from. I read that Buenos Aires became a naked city as residents hovered around television sets, and that even Congress came to a halt. I wanted to be in that naked city, or anywhere in Argentina, and stop this feeling of detachment in an empty room. I wanted to embrace the contradictions of what it means to come from a land that is both enchanted and haunted, from a place that knows how to dream underground as a form of immunity from real nightmares. I wanted to be back home in the country that, despite our numerous losses, still knows how to win.
