Monday, July 13, 2026
The Paysandu Passports, Part 5
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.
