Soccer on Chile's Killing Field

This article is on the Op-Ed page of today's LA Times.

Soccer on Chile's Killing Field
By Dave Zirin

IN 1995, I went to Chile's National Stadium to watch a
soccer match. Soccer was something I neither enjoyed
nor understood, but the game was hardly on my mind;
instead, it was the arena.

I was 20 years old and had come to Chile to study. I
also hoped to meet some of the surviving allies of
leftist President Salvador Allende, who had been
toppled in the 1973 coup by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. I
didn't care that the team Colo Colo was playing
Universidad de Chile, a squad affiliated with the
college until 1980. I didn't understand why security
police were everywhere, or why someone threw a flaming
brick at me as I walked to the cheering section for La
U, as the Universidad team is also known.

All I could think of was: My God! This is National
Stadium, where the bleachers were once filled with
dissidents of every stripe after the coup, a mass
waiting room for those about to be executed or
tortured. This is where women were raped for the crime
of wearing pants.

And it was at nearby Chile Stadium where the great
Victor Jara — the Bob Dylan of Chile and a political
activist (or was Dylan the Victor Jara of the U.S.?) —
was murdered by the Pinochet regime. Jara's fingers
were mutilated in front of thousands of other
prisoners. He attempted to sing songs of resistance,
his hands bloody stumps, only to be gunned down as
people in the stands tried to join him in chorus.

I didn't want to be near these places any more than I
would want to watch a baseball game at Auschwitz.

But a friend saw the pained look on my face and
started to explain some of the history behind this
rivalry. I learned that Pinochet called himself
"President of Colo Colo" during his rule. My friend, a
former student at the university, told me that the
school had been the center of radical ferment, which
Pinochet crushed. He told me about the students
tortured, murdered, disappeared or, if they were
lucky, expelled — not from the school but from the
country. He told me of the students who remained,
forced to study in the gray conformity of
dictatorship. He told me of programs called limpieza
cabezas (head cleaning) in which students were forced
to listen to lectures on neoliberal economics.

All of a sudden it made sense to me why the tension in
the stadium — five years after Pinochet had stepped
down — was so palpable, with separate seating for La U
and Colo Colo fans.

By 1995, Chile had existed uneasily as a nominal
democracy for four years. Yet there had been no
reconciliation and no reckoning for the victims of the
Pinochet era. Pinochet's rule led to the deaths or
disappearances of nearly 3,200 people and the torture
of thousands more. Yet no one had answered for these
crimes. The general, as a condition for stepping down
from power, had been allowed to rewrite the
constitution to make him and his cohorts immune from
prosecution. And he was also still in charge of the
army.

In such a climate, I realized why this was so much
more than a game. It was a place of catharsis. In a
country where emotive _expressions are frowned upon, it
was a place to scream to the heavens, to howl at
injustice and to take a symbolic pound of flesh
against your enemies — under the guise of a soccer
match.

It was also the place where I saw my first live soccer
match. It was where I finally got it. The insane
endurance on the field; the powerful fakes, twists and
turns; the explosion with every goal. As a basketball
junkie, I saw why this — and not hoops — was the
beautiful game. Basketball, at its best, is about
teamwork and acting in concert with others. But too
often, it's one guy making a move while four stand
around.

That day, I didn't see anyone — players or spectators
— just standing around. There I was, dancing in the
aisles as La U and its fans avenged 20 years of pain
and defeat. It felt good to imagine Pinochet hearing
about this game and gnashing his capped teeth.

Of course, neither I nor anyone in my section were
fooling ourselves that this was somehow an actual
"victory," with the fates of so many victims
unresolved. It was symbolism, pure and simple. But it
was also an _expression of humanity, of resilience and
release.

Now Pinochet is dead, never forced to take residence
in the cage he so richly deserved. But as a Chilean
friend e-mailed me after Pinochet's death: "In Chile,
we have always known the truth about this evil man. It
does my heart well that jail was his immediate future,
and that he knew it." This is right. Any public
humiliation Pinochet received at the end was the
result of a movement of ordinary folks who never gave
up. If the cheers for La U back in 1995 offered even a
shard of support to those who felt their cause was
just, then it was worth every last exquisite shout.


[Dave Zirin is the author of "'What's My Name Fool?':
Sports and Resistance in the United States" (Haymarket
Books) You can receive his column Edge of Sports,
every week by e-mailing edgeofsports-subscribe@zirin.com.

Contact him at dave@edgeofsports.com]

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