Putting Those 1978 Ghosts to Bed

Whilst the Spaniards were ending 44 years of hurt with their victory over Germany in the Euro 2008 final this past Sunday, a different kind of ‘hurt’ was being put to bed in Buenos Aires.

30 years had passed since the Argentine national team lifted their first ever World Cup trophy. It was a tournament they hosted and should have gone down as a glorified moment in Argentine folklore. However it remains forever blighted by the dark military dictatorship and the so-called “Dirty War” it inflicted upon its people. The way in which the regime purposefully used the staging of the World Cup as propaganda tool, à la Hitler’s 1936 Olympics, and as to distract a population’s worries about the continuous desaparecidos has cast a black shadow over what was at the time Argentina’s greatest ever sporting triumph. Moreover, though slight in comparison, the military have been accused of bribing the Peruvian national side to lose heavily to Argentina, when the Argentines needed at least a 4-0 victory to guarantee their place in the final (they beat Peru 6-0).


This Sunday ex-members of the World Cup winning team, human rights activists took part in a memorial match - "La otra final: el partido por la vida y los derechos humanos" - for the 30,000 Argentines who lost their lives during this dark chapter of Argentine history. Many of the ex-players had wanted to put to bed once and for all that they in someway had been used by the military regime. As young football players they had little idea of the horrors being perpetrated by their leaders and little understanding of how their success was being manipulated to make a population turn a blind eye towards the atrocities.

Perhaps most chilling of all is the stories of the imprisoned opponents in the military detention and torture that was situated only a short distance from the main stadium in Buenos Aires during the World Cup. Here prisoners told how, chained to their beds, they could hear their guards listening to the game on the radio and the crowds celebrate as the goals went in. The 1980 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, who was imprisoned at the time recalls how

En la prisión, cuando ponían el partido en los altoparlantes, era muy contradictorio. Porque los ejecutores, aquellos que nos torturaban, y nosotros, las víctimas, gritábamos juntos '¡Gol de Argentina!'. Y sabemos que sacaban afuera a prisioneros cuando había distracciones por la Copa Mundial y les disparaban (source BBC Mundo "A 30 años de un triunfo empañado" 30/06/2008)

When they played a game over the speakers, it was very contradictory - because the executioners, those who tortured us, and us the victims both cried 'Goal Argentina!' And we know that they took prisoners out when there were distractions caused by the World Cup and shot them (source BBC News, "Football match evokes Dirty War", 30/06/2008)

Thankfully for Argentine and Argentine football only a few years would have to pass before the dictatorship crumbled and Maradona could restore national pride with the his glorious one-man show in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico.