Friday, July 10, 2026
The Paysandu Passports, Part 2
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.
