Sunday, July 12, 2026
The Paysandu Passports, Part 4
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.
