The Football Tragic

Perhaps fortunately for the Chilean youngsters, the timing of the Paysandu scandal was particularly unfortunate for Pinochet's regime, given that one of issues involved was that of faked passports. A cause célèbre at the time was the trial of the notorious Chilean double agent Michael Townley, who orchestrated the 1976 assassination of the expatriate Chilean socialist Orlando Letelier (no relation to the footballer) in Washington D.C. Ironically, given the events in Paysandu, Townley had carried out his operation at Pinochet's behest under...a fake Paraguayan passport!

With all this in mind, the government did not appoint a special investigating judge to examine the case of the Chilean players' fake passports, as was the convention; the matter would be dealt with quietly. Nevertheless, despite the pleas of the players' families to concentrate on punishing those really responsible, the judge appointed to the case informed the players that they would all have to answer for their actions as adults. Some were in tears.

They needn't have worried. There had already been signs that, despite the initial harsh treatment, they were not going to endure a long stretch in prison. The guards at the penitentiary, far from mistreating these youth internationals, were only too happy to join in kickarounds with their distinguished charges in the prison yard. Only in South America.

The scenes at the tribunal were farcical. General Gordon and the delegation chief Alberto Mela blamed each other for what had happened. The players, originally producing garbled self-contradictory accounts, eventually confessed to having been visited by Gordon at the training complex prior to the tournament. Pedro Garcia claimed he had no prior knowledge of the matter, until the team's physical trainer contradicted him. 

The players were released after twelve days, with no serious consequences. Gordon was quickly whisked out of the country to avoid further scrutiny, being appointed ambassador to Nicaragua. The lesser officials received trivial, non-custodial sentences. Predictably, Garcia was made fall guy, but his sentence was not handed down until 1982. His eventual three-year sentence counted as time already served, even though he had been happily continuing his coaching career in the meantime!

The punishment for those involved, in other words, was utterly negligible.

We should perhaps leave the last word on the matter to the team's goalkeeper, one of the over-age players. "We all knew. And when I say all, I mean all the officials, staff, coach and players. But it didn't seem all that serious to us."

That goalkeeper was a certain Roberto Rojas, who became Chile's first-choice goalkeeper and captain for much of the 1980s. In 1989, he was the central figure in a scandal infinitely more consequential than the Paysandu affair. And many believe that the seeds of the infamous Maracanazo were sown in Paysandu, and in the consequent belief that you could get away with anything as a footballer in Chile. Along with Rojas, several of the Paysandu crew were on the pitch that day in Rio de Janeiro - Fernando Astengo, Juan Carlos Letelier, and Particio Yañez, whose obscene gesture to the Brazilian fans as the Chileans walked off the pitch became notorious in its own right.

Yañez has since declared that the events of ten years earlier in Uruguay directly influenced what happened in 1989. The Chilean sports journalist and commentator Felipe Bianchi, now a popular podcaster, opined at greater length: "In fact, it's impossible to imagine what happened in 1989 at the Maracanã without the precedent of the Paysandu scandal 10 years earlier; several of the protagonists were the same people and had, in a way, practiced...let's call it that."

Old sins cast long shadows.

# posted by Mike Salter @ 11:22 AM 0 comments

It is easy to imagine the Chilean youth coach Pedro Garcia's frustration after his team's miserable start to the continental junior championship in Uruguay. What was the point of the elaborate passport scheme if his more experienced players were going to be thrashed anyway? 

What is less easy to understand is what he and his players did next. In an attempt to explain away their abysmal performance against Paraguay in the opening group game, the Chileans openly accused the Paraguayans of...using over-age players.

Oh dear.

The sequel was all too predictable. The Paraguayan federation made a formal complaint to CONMEBOL. Formal complaints, of course, have to be investigated. And straight away, an irregularity appeared. The two Chilean players who had taken part in the 1977 youth championship had their registration forms for that event examined. Needless to say, the dates of birth did not match.

These two players then mysteriously suffered injuries, and were replaced by two players from the original squad assembled by Garcia. But it was too late. The chagrined president of Santiago's Colo Colo club confirmed that one of the club's contracted players, Raul Ormeño, was too old for the team. Typically, the Chilean football federation, in a desperate bid to avoid being implicated, hurriedly released the proper information about the players. The loathed carabinero Eduardo Gordon, who many still believe was the ultimate instigator of the fraud, was hanging Garcia and his players out to dry.

Garcia tried to deny any wrongdoing, but by the time Chile had saved some face with two wins later in the tournament, the Santiago daily La Tercera had published the real ages of the players. To make matters even worse, the paper's reporter in Paysandu, Carlos Jimeno, had meanwhile broken the story about the trip to the brothel.

The team and their coach knew they were in serious trouble. The long journey back home, with no fewer than three stopovers, was unbearably tense. "Everyone was frightened on the plane," recalled the future international Fernando Astengo, one of the replacements for the "injured" duo. "Some were even crying." In the initial panic, the team's manager Enrique Jorquera had intended to burn the fake passports in Uruguay, but he then realised that returning to Chile without passports would make the situation considerably worse.

On arrival at the airport in Santiago, Garcia, Jorquera and several of the players were taken straight to prison, where they were held incommunicado for several days. Juan Carlos Letelier, a future stalwart of the national team, recalled that the experience of being held in a small cell, unable to see his parents and uncertain of his future liberty, made him want to quit football for good.

In the end, partly for broader political reasons, the affair dissolved into a classic whitewash - but one with serious consequences many years later. To be concluded in Part 5.

# posted by Mike Salter @ 3:49 PM 0 comments

The decision by Chilean officials to send a squad of over-age players to the continental junior tournament in 1979 necessitated some sleight-of-hand with the documentation. In short, with the help of a pliable tourist agency and an equally malleable Civic Registry official, the new attendees at the national training complex were issued with faked identity cards, with which they obtained false passports.

One small problem with this was that those under 21 required permission from their parents to travel abroad. Many players in the new squad were over 21, despite the 19 years and 6 months age limit (one player was nearly 23), and ended up forging their parents' signatures, in the interests of secrecy. One player, Agustin Villazón, scribbled his father's name in the appropriate box despite Señor Villazón snr. having passed away some time earlier.

Not everyone went along with the fraud. Two players called up for the over-age squad prudently withdrew after considering the implications, while the forward Hector Hoffens was fortunate to have as his coach at the Universitário club the eminence grise of Chilean football, Fernando Riera. Riera, coach of the Chilean side which gained third place at the 1962 World Cup, threatened to sack Hoffens from Universitário if he went along with "the farce".

The only journalist travelling with the team, Carlos Jimeno of the Santiago daily La Tercera, was an ex-footballer himself and knew all about the skullduggery. He, like the others, had been convinced to stay quiet, accepting the "explanation" that all the other teams would be fielding over-age players too. 

The tournament in Uruguay was divided into two groups, and the Chileans were in the group based in the small town of Paysandu, on the border with Argentina. The other group, based in Montevideo, was the centre of attention, including as it did the hosts, with their promising playmaker Ruben Paz, and a star-studded Argentinian team which featured a certain Diego Maradona.

Chile, it seemed, had avoided the heavyweights. Yet if Garcia hoped to get an edge over his opponents with his squad-switching, he was in for a terrible shock. In Chile's first game against Paraguay, the latter's forward pairing of Roberto Cabañas and Julio Romero - later to combine impressively at the 1986 World Cup - took Chile apart. Paraguay won 6-0.

Perhaps, ironically, the more mature age of the Chilean players was one of the factors in the drubbing. On the eve of the match, a delegation of players had approached Garcia for leave to visit the post office to send letters to their families. Garcia granted permission, but Jimeno smelled a rat. Sure enough, with the assistance of a local journalist, he discovered the truth: the players had trooped off to the town's brothel.

Chile lost the next match 1-0 to Brazil, and their chance of qualifying for the Under-20 World Cup was already gone. On the upside, such a miserable campaign would normally have obviated any suspicion regarding age-fiddling.

But then came one of the most spectacular own goals in football history - and it was not scored on the field. To be continued in Part 4.

# posted by Mike Salter @ 12:45 PM 0 comments

The 1970s were, on the whole, a dark time for South America. It was the height of the Cold War, and with the United States desperate to avoid another Castro on their doorstep, a number of CIA-backed thugs either took or retained power on the continent. And there were few more sanguinary thugs than General Augusto Pinochet, who overthrew the leftist Salvador Allende in Chile in a notorious coup in 1973.

South America's caudillos had always looked to sport, and football in particular, as a propaganda vehicle for their regimes. This "policy" reached its apogee with Argentina's 1978 World Cup triumph, but there were other one-off events which were geared towards a publicity coup for the generals, including Brazil's tacky Taça Independencia of 1972, and Uruguay's slightly more substantial Mundialito tournament of 1980/81. 

There were no such propaganda triumphs for Chile. Although they qualified for the 1974 World Cup, in somewhat disreputable fashion, they failed to shine. They fared miserably in the 1975 Copa America, and missed out on the 1978 World Cup. Pinochet and his lieutenants, the carabineros, were impatient for some success on the football field.

One of these carabineros was a certain Eduardo Gordon, who was appointed head of the Chilean Football Association in 1975. Tasked with improving the domestic game, Gordon expanded the first division and prohibited national team players from being sold abroad, with an eye towards the 1978 qualification series. However, he also ensured that the star of Chilean football at the time, Carlos Caszely, was omitted from the crucial qualifying games against Peru...so as not to offend Pinochet. Caszely was an outspoken supporter of the deposed Allende. Peru went to the tournament in Argentina, and Chile stayed home.

There remained the arena of youth football. The South American youth football championship had been running since 1954, but it now doubled as a qualifying event for the new Under-20 World Cup. The next edition of the continental championship was to take place in Uruguay in January 1979, and Gordon was determined to give the new Chilean youth coach, 32-year-old Pedro Garcia, all the support that a government could provide: three months of preparation, experience playing against seasoned professionals, help from sports psychologists, and...a little bit more.

Almost immediately, things started to go wrong. Of the 28 players initially called up by Garcia, only five arrived on time to the Juan Pinto Durán training complex in Santiago. Eventually, the youngsters all dribbled in, and began a month of training. Patricio Yañez, later one of Chile's best players in an otherwise dismal showing at the 1982 World Cup, recalled that almost no-one in the training camp knew the others initially. Gradually, they started to make friends, and by the end of the month a certain camaraderie and excitement was building.

Suddenly, most of the squad were sent home.

Garcia had decided that the players at his disposal were simply not good enough for a serious tilt at the continental title. Although it is unclear to this day who made the initial suggestion that some older players be recruited, Garcia summoned 17 new players into the squad, whose ages, as everyone knew, were north of the 19 years and 6 months limit. A couple had even participated in the previous championship in 1977. Among these newcomers were future national team regulars such as Juan Carlos Letelier, Raul Ormeño and Roberto Rojas (remember that name).

Needless to say, the initial recruits were devastated, and they knew exactly what was going on. But a gag was quickly put in place. Carlos Gonzalez Romero, later a journeyman player and coach in Chile, recalled his feelings at being discarded: "When I saw that despite having gone through the entire process, they were leaving us behind to cheat, I cried out of pure helplessness. In fact, when we left Pinto Durán, they gave us a talk in which they asked, or rather demanded, that we remain silent forever."

If an excuse were possible, it was that many nations in South America were apparently pulling the same trick at the time. But the Chileans went further than most, and later drew attention to themselves in an act of extraordinary foolishness. More in Part 3.

# posted by Mike Salter @ 6:10 PM 0 comments

Before I begin this tragicomic little tale, a small personal anecdote.

Long ago, during my brief foray into the world of football journalism proper, I had the opportunity to attend a women's youth World Cup in an official capacity (long story). This was a very enjoyable and informative experience in many ways, and provided some golden memories...as well as one of the funniest moments of my life.

A week or so into the tournament, the officials at the tournament were treated to a slap-up dinner by the local organizers, with various beverages flowing all too freely. Some of the coaches at the tournament were also present at this shindig, including the coach of the Brazilian women's youth team, who was partaking of the liquid refreshment with vigour. As we were heading off to our hotel rooms, most of us warm but not particularly dry, the Brazilian gentleman cornered me and indicated he would like a word. We had exchanged a few pleasantries during the evening, but I had no idea why he was so keen to speak to a relative stranger, let alone someone so insignificant. It soon became clear that his words were not meant for anyone too high on the ladder.

"What do you think of the Nigerian team?" he demanded without any preliminaries. Brazil's next game, a crucial one for qualification to the next round, was against Nigeria.

I knew immediately what was up. There had already been murmurs about the ages of the Nigerian side, many of whom looked a good deal older than 17. I had my own suspicions in this regard, but, needless to say, I wasn't going to voice them. However, these suspicions, along with the wine, had an unfortunate effect on my reply. 

"Oh, yes, quite good, erm...physically very strong." I immediately realised I'd put my foot in it.

The Brazilian smiled. "They are all women, no?" he growled.

Whoops. "Oh, erm, I don't know," I stammered.

The smile became a good deal broader. "'I don't know', means 'YES', no?" he retorted before giving vent to a warm chuckle which it took all my self-control not to share. I managed to mutter a hasty farewell before returning to my room and collapsing in uncontrollable laughter.

Such was the stigma that attached to African teams in youth tournaments at the time, following some recent scandals, that the Brazilian's suspicions were hardly surprising. Yet it was in his own continent that such scandals first became widespread - including a bizarre episode in 1979 which involved a corrupt authoritarian government desperate for footballing success, a compliant coach, a number of suborned players, and a grim sequel ten years afterwards.

This is the sad but intermittently amusing tale of the Paysandu affair. More in Part 2.

# posted by Mike Salter @ 9:31 PM 0 comments