On 11^th May, police shut down and inspected a school following a bomb threat. As a school with connections to the first division football club Independiente, it was widely suspected that football hooligans were behind the threat.

Violence in futbol, an issue needing to be solved (Photo: Parisa)

Just over one week later, another group of hooligans (barras bravas in Latin America) waited for Giovanni Moreno, a player for football team Racing Club, after a training session. Threatening to end his career if he did not leave the team, they pointed a gun at his knee and warned: “Things will get worse for you if you don’t.”

In the same month, Independiente’s vice-president Claudio Keblaitis and members of his family received death threats, while the death of Daniel Sosa, 21, grabbed the media’s attention. On Monday, the death of Gonzalo Saucedo, also 21, added to the exhaustive list of victims of football violence.

Argentina’s long-standing and highly complex problem of football violence is spiralling out of control, and has been thrown sharply into focus this year. Left unresolved for decades by the national government and the Argentine Football Association, (AFA) the issue has reached a tipping point.

Cantero and the Fight for Independiente 

Nizzardo, head of NGO Salvemos al Futbol (Photo: Agus Carini)

The recent election of Javier Cantero as president of Independiente in December 2011 has brought the issue of football violence to the fore. After pledging to put a stop to the money and support given to the club’s particularly violent band of barras bravas by his predecessor, Cantero’s personal campaign may have finally incited action against the problem.

“Cantero and what he is doing has created a lot of noise in the news, and we’re applauding him,” says Monica Nizzardo, from Salvemos Al Futbol (Let’s Save Football). Having founded the non-governmental organisation that has been working to tackle violence and corruption in Argentine football for the last six years, Nizzardo has been collaborating closely with Cantero for two years.

“We’re making a step forward with Cantero. In six years, there has only been one Cantero, and we need to move forward and continue with the struggle.”

Cantero met with members of the AFA and the national government last week to discuss solutions to the violence, but Nizzardo is doubtful of how willing the government are to tackle the issue.

“What I see is a farce. [The government and AFA] are trying to look like they’re doing something. They’ll say, we’ll do a meeting, but it’s a farce. Where’s the action?”

An Escalating Business of Violence, Money and Power

Far from a recent phenomenon, football violence goes hand-in-hand with the nation’s most beloved sport. With the first football-related death recorded in 1924, Argentina has almost witnessed a staggering 100 years of football hooliganism.

Emerging as a more organised brand of hooliganism in the 50s and 60s, each major and minor club in the country has a corresponding group of barras bravas, with some of the most violent hooligans affiliating with River Plate, Independiente, and Boca.

Originally, barras bravas provided guaranteed support for clubs at matches, as well as physical force on hand for club managers. Starting with certain privileges such as free transport to matches or an asado at a game, the power, influence and demands of the barras bravashave been growing at an alarming rate.

Fans in action at a football match (Photo: Nacho AKD)

“As they began to demand more and more privileges, they would see how using violence got them things,” notes Nizzardo. “They would see how people became cowards in front of them, and give them what they wanted.” 

Typically earning money through selling merchandise, tickets, refreshments, controlling car parking at higher profile matches, and often receiving a cut of a player’s transfer fee, hooliganism in Argentina is a lucrative business.

And it is business that is at the core of the issue. With many football clubs having two competing factions of barras bravas, the never-ending violence has become a battle for money and power.

“It’s not a fight of passion, or to fight for who is better in a rivalry,” says Nizzardo adamantly. “No, they are fighting for money. There are often two factions in the same barra. Obviously they are not fighting for their team. They are fighting for money and power, for the power that money gives them.”

A Tangled Web of Vested Interests

But while the phenomenon has been changing and the levels of violence increasing, the national government and the AFA have done nothing to solve the issue plaguing Argentine football.

For experts working on the issue, two hindering factors have become increasingly evident: impunity in the justice system and the longstanding and central issue of corruption – particularly the link between politics and football violence.

The stadium of Boca Juniors Club (Photo: Elemaki)

Gustavo Grabia, an expert on the subject and author of The 12: The True History of Boca Hooligans, has stated that “in Argentina, hooligans have worked for all the different political parties since they were created […] A lot of [barras bravas] supported the military government in the seventies, like “El Negro” Thompson in Quilmes, and then they became supporters of Alfonsín, Menem, Duhalde and now Kirchner.” With their different and often contrasting ideologies, it becomes clear that barras bravas work for money and impunity, regardless of the cause.

This unique link between politics and the barras bravas makes the issue of hooliganism in Argentina far more complex than football violence in other countries, particularly those in Europe.

European specialist Otto Adang summed up the complexity of Argentina’s own brand of football violence. In a talk given in 2009 he stated that “the European solution is useless in Argentina. European hooligans were misfits that got together in groups with no relationship with the government whatsoever. In Argentina, hooligans are part of the business: they take part in the buying and selling of footballers, manage things like merchandising […] and have astonishing political connections.”

Just as football managers would use barras bravas for a display of support, politicians similarly employ the hooligans to raise a flag at matches, or to boost numbers at demonstrations, in exchange for money, power and total impunity.

“A book came out in the Feria del Libro that spoke about INDEC [the national statistics office, suspected of irregularities], by writer Gustavo Noriega,” Nizarro recounts, “and the barra of Chicago club went there to break up the presentation of the book because it spoke badly about this government worker, [Domestic Trade Minister Guillermo] Moreno. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing, a barra openly working for Moreno.”

Football violence has become a much bigger issue than violence and danger in stadiums. The head of River Plate was recently told by a barra brava from his own club: “I respond to Moreno.” With hooligans no longer answering to club managers, but to politicians, the issue is not just in the hands of club managers, even if they carry a huge portion of the blame up until now.

“The relation with politics is making this harder. The heads of the clubs say, ‘I’m reporting things but they are working for political parties. Who is going to protect me?’” says Nizarro

Nizarro states "the relation with politics is making this harder" (Photo: Agus Carini)

In the case of the Argentine justice system, experts have continually criticised its passive role in football violence. With most football-related incidents going unpunished, the sense of impunity is high, and families of victims of football violence are all too often left with no sense of justice.

For Grabia, the justice system is just as at fault as the deep level of corruption, and states “we have to say that judges do not take this issue very seriously.” He notes that, with no special court for football violence, cases are often sent to courts that also deal with rape, murder, theft, or abductions. Since football-related incidents are typically categorised as “injuries in fight,” they are often not considered important enough. Grabia claims that “all the [club managers] know that they have impunity, and so do police officers.”

A Complex Problem with an Obvious Solution

Margaret Thatcher once asked the English footballer Bert Millichip: “What are you doing to keep our society free from your hooligans?” to which he replied: “What are you doing to keep your hooligans out of our football?”

With the issue of politics at the crux of the situation, and with football violence currently in the spotlight, Argentina now faces the huge challenge of eradicating a damaging but integral part of football.

The concrete solution is glaringly obvious to those such as Nizzardo and Grabia who have dedicated themselves to the issue: to permanently break the link between the barras and politicians. With a handful of other basic strategies such as official sale of tickets and identification of those entering stadiums, levels of violence and impunity can also be brought down.

“The biggest thing we need is the political will to disarm the mafias that are attached to each club, which are funded by businessmen who want the clubs to become businesses,” says Nizzardo. “They in turn are financed by politicians because they are used as a workforce to help them. The government knows it needs a strategic and integral plan, not just attacking the heads of the football clubs, who do also have to take part of the responsibility.”

The government undoubtedly has the resources and the ability to investigate the issue. But the real question is whether politicians are seriously willing to stamp out this business of violence that has claimed 261 lives so far.

What do Argentines think should be done about football violence? Click here to find out.

The world of Argentine football is plunging into a spiral of violence with recent reports of death threats and gunpoint assaults of players and club managers.

Javier Cantero, the president of Independiente football club, who is fighting a personal battle against the ferocious hooligans of his own team, said he feels increasingly isolated, La Nación newspaper wrote today.

Yesterday, three hooligans threatened Racing Club’s Colombian player Giovanni Moreno with a revolver as he left the training pitch. “You gotta put more balls in it,” they allegedly said according to Federico Santander, another Racing player who was with Moreno at the time of the aggression.

“If not, everything will be more complicated.” Pointing the gun at his knee, the aggressors also told him to leave the club if he did not want his career ruined once for all.

According to Argentine media, football hooligans also threatened four managing directors of another club, River Plate, including its president Daniel Passarella. “The premier league or dead,” was allegedly the threat reported by many news sources, in reference to the club’s promotion efforts.

Interviewed by Telam, however, Passarella denied the allegations saying that it was all a “bunch of lies.”

After meeting with the club representatives, menaced football player Moreno decided not to file a case against his aggressors, nor did Turnes, Bravo and Mancusi – respectively vice-president, secretary and spokesperson of the River Plate football club.

There  is also the ongoing case of the harsh confrontation between Independiente hooligans and the club’s president, Javier Cantero.

In an exclusive interview with La Nación, Cantero said that if in his club “hooligans are repudiated, at Boca some hooligans are photographed and some of them are asked autographs.

“The support towards us is global. We don’t feel lonely. It’s a social problem; some people idolise the subverted moral values of the hooligans’ leaders. […] No one called me to express his sympathy, but I reckon they will in the next hours,” Cantero declared.

Relations between the barrabravas (football hooligans) and Cantero have becoming increasingly tense since he took leadership. Due to a bomb threat by suspected football hooligans on 11^th May, police shut down and inspected a school linked to Independiente Club, a first division club from Avellaneda, a city south of Buenos Aires.

Hooligans accuse their president of illegitimately detaining the club flags carrying the colours of Independiente, something considered an act of extreme outrage in the hooligans’ code of honour.

His second in line, vicepresident Claudo Keblaitis, recently received death threats and asked for 30 days leave due to the distressing situation.

Today Police shut down and inspected a school linked to the Independiente football club due to a bomb threat by suspected football hooligans.

Claudio Ciancio, the club’s administrative secretary, reported that two employees of Independiente club were threatened there “would be a bomb concealed to explode in the morning,” by a self-identified male fan between 3pm-4pm yesterday.

Hooligans warned that unless flags carrying the colours of the club were returned to the Independiente fans, they would plant bombs in the school attached to the club. “If they don’t return the flags, we will make them fly,” the hooligans were reported to have said in Infobae.

A bomb squad raided the school around 8am this morning, looking for the device, but found nothing. Police are still preventing school children from entering the school.

The school, attended by 1400 children, is located on the crossroad of Alsina and Bochini, just metres from the stadium.

Relations between the BarraBravas (football hooligans) and club president, Javier Cantero, are becoming increasingly tense ever since he took leadership.

This evening, at 7pm, there will be a march to support Javier Cantero. The leader of the BarraBravas has organised a counter march an hour before at 6pm.

“The security agencies told us that they will take the necessary measures so that those who come will not suffer any problems,” said Caincio, talking about the march.

Santojanni hospital, located in the neighbourhood of Mataderos, city of Buenos Aires, was in chaos yesterday after hooligans linked to the Nueva Chicago football club entered looking to exact revenge for the death of a companion killed earlier that day.

Agustín Alejo Rodriguez, a member of ‘Los Perales’ faction, was killed during clashes between hooligans a few blocks away from the Nueva Chicago stadium.

After it became known that one of the men believed to be responsible for the murder was recovering in the nearby Santojanni hospital, members from ‘Los Perales’ entered and began looking for him. In the ensuing conflict, windows, curtains and hospital equipment were broken, while doctors and patients were terrorised.

This is the second serious act of violence seen in Santojanni hospital since the government decided to remove federal police officers from their positions in many of the city’s public places. A month after their removal in April last year, a 22-year-old man was stabbed in the neck after a fellow patient accused him of trying to rob them.

The removal of Federal police officers has been widely criticised by hospital staff, who maintain that they cannot provide care to patients unless their safety is guaranteed.

“Today citizens cannot be attended to because security is not guaranteed, just as it was not guaranteed last year. If the health worker is not safe, then health itself cannot be attended to” explained Marcelo Struminger, president of the Medical Association of Santojanni.

Security can only be guaranteed, according to Struminger, with a police presence. “This group of people would not have gone in if there had been in front of them security personnel with executive capacity, or action or authority to intervene” he asserted.

On 9th October, Pablo Martín Gómez was stopped at traffic lights on the way to his girlfriend’s house in Rosario. A motorcycle pulled up alongside his vehicle and, without saying a word, one of the riders shot the driver four times. Before falling into a coma from which he would never wake up, Gomez managed to call a friend saying: “They found me. They shot me.”

Though the incident occurred away from any stadium, investigators suspect that Gomez is yet another victim of the unrelenting violence that plagues Argentine football. In a country where the beautiful game is sacrosanct, the action on the pitch is all-too-frequently overshadowed by the brutal antics of the barra bravas (meaning ‘tough gangs’, the Latin American term for football hooligans).

According to NGO Salvemos al Fútbol (Let’s Save Football), Gómez, a former member of Newell’s Old Boys’ barra brava, was the 243rd victim of football violence in the country. Newspaper reports suggest the 29-year-old may have murdered by members of his old gang, which has been embroiled in a fierce leadership battle since long-standing chief Roberto ‘Pimpi’ Camino was imprisoned earlier in the year. The manner of his execution leaves little doubt that the modern barra brava is far more sophisticated and sinister than the band of thugs more commonly associated with football violence.

Photo by Mark Robinson

La Boca Barra Brava.

The Evolution Of The Barras

Football-related deaths are not a new phenomenon in Argentina: the first reported incident occurred in 1924, when a Uruguayan fan was shot by a Boca Juniors sympathiser. But investigative journalist and author Amílcar Romero, widely considered the country’s leading expert on football violence, identifies 1958, and the killing of River Plate fan Alberto Linker, as the first appearance of the ‘organised, professional and institutionalised’ barra brava recognised today.

The transition was supported by directors who proved willing to offer certain privileges – beginning with free entry to matches – to keep the ‘rulers of the terrace’ as an ally. With a foot in the door, barra bravas quickly extended their influence, demanding a greater input in decision-making and soliciting more and more concessions from officials, coaches and even players.

Those who didn’t follow the rules would lose the support of the stands. In a famous example, ex-Boca Juniors striker Jorge Rinaldi recalls how his life became a nightmare after he refused to attend a players’ dinner organised by La Doce (Boca’s barra): “from that moment, every time I stepped foot on the pitch I was hit by waves of insults from the stands where the barra stood. It was as if I were one of the most hated enemies and not someone defending the club that they claim to love.”

Rinaldi’s ‘no’ appears to be more the exception than the rule. Today, on top of free admission and travel to away fixtures, the barras, especially in the bigger clubs, earn a comfortable living from the sale of merchandising and refreshments, the control of parking around the stadium, and the sale of tickets (at inflated prices). This is sometimes topped up with income generated by more covert means: sales of drugs, a cut of player’s transfer fees and cash-in-hand jobs within the club.

The exact sources of finances are difficult to pinpoint, but with such a lucrative business operation on offer for those in charge, it should be of no surprise that distinct factions of the same barra compete for a bigger slice of the pie. And in a world where violence is considered capital, the consequences are almost certain to be tragic.

Gomez was the eighth casualty of intra-barra fighting in 2009. And it could easily get worse: alongside the trouble at Newell’s, the barra bravas of Estudiantes and Huracán are also involved in a long-running battle for dominance. In March of this year, competing groups within Boca Junior’s La Doce exchanged fire on a busy junction by Parque Lezama, wounding an elderly lady who was eating lunch at a nearby McDonalds.

In the most high-profile example of recent years, a dispute within River Plate’s ‘Los Borrachos del Tablón’ (the drunks in the stands) descended into a full-blown war early in 2007, allegedly over the split of the estimated $50,000 received from the sale of Gonzalo Higuain to Real Madrid. Though River president José María Aguilar distanced himself from the incidents, investigators revealed that more than half of the barra were on the club’s payroll. Among them was Gonzalo Acro, who earned $5,700 a month working at the swimming pool in River Plate’s sports complex. In August 2007, Acro was shot four times as he left a gym in Buenos Aires – an mafia-style assassination that would set a disturbing precedent.

Photo by Fabricio Di Dio

Passionate fans of the Club Atlético Platense at the stadium in Vicente López.

Fighting A Losing Battle

The evolution and escalation of violence at the hands of the barra brava clearly points to a failure on behalf of the state and security forces to stamp out hooliganism from the sport. So far, the Argentina Football Association, AFA’s main strategy involves using more police and security forces to physically keeping opposing fans apart. In top division matches, blocks of empty seats are used as a buffer zone to separate the two groups of supporters. In lower league clubs, visiting fans are barred from stadiums altogether. The latest La Plata derby between Gimnasia and Estudiantes was played out in an empty arena due to fears of fighting among the rival barra bravas.

While this approach may prevent disturbances in the stadium during a game, it is ineffective against barra brava in-fighting and besides, according Salvemos al Fútbol data, three quarters of football-related deaths occurred outside the ground. Worse still, a heavy police presence is likely to incite more violence if officers are unable to maintain order without becoming the aggressors. The 19 football-related deaths that have been directly caused by police repression is evidence that this isn’t always the case in Argentina.

Beyond the questionable capacity of those in uniform, sociologist and sports journalist Sergio Levinsky believes policies based upon exclusion only serve to reinforce a culture of incompatibility in Argentine society that stems from the series of political, economic and moral crises the country faced in the last half century.

The scars of this difficult period – particularly the seven years of state-sponsored terrorism at the hands of a brutal military regime – are visible in the world of football today. “These days, one set of fans will insult the other by saying ‘you don’t even exist, you don’t exist’. This is what the military dictatorship did with the ‘disappeared’. It imposed a certain way of looking at others, of not even recognising another person’s right to exist.” For Levinsky, AFA’s security policies reflect this social phenomenon: “It’s another way of denying existence, this time of violence in football.”

See No Evil

Levinsky’s idea of denial fits with the patent lack of political courage or conviction to eradicate football violence, neatly summed up by the inscription “todo pasa” (anything goes) on the ring worn by long-serving AFA president Julio Grondona. Club presidents, police chiefs and local government officials are quick to distance themselves from responsibility in the aftermath of a violent tragedy, preferring to protect their own image rather than work together to find a lasting solution.

In June, Interior Minister Aníbal Fernandez (now cabinet chief and official spokesman for the Kirchner government), argued that the killing of two Huracán barra bravas was not football-related, given that the attacks happened four hours after the game against Arsenal de Sarandí. When a fierce terrace brawl among River’s ‘Los Borrachos’ in March 2008 left one fan in a coma for a week, the subsequent police record stated that the man’s injuries were the result of an epileptic fit at the entrance to the stadium. Even when a subsequent investigation by sports journalist Gustavo Grabia unearthed photographs that proved that the man was inside the stadium when the fight broke out, no one launched a follow-up investigation.

Photo by Fabricio Di Dio

The Barra Brava at La Bombonera, the stadium of the famed Buenos Aires soccer club Boca Juniors.

These weak cover-ups of football violence are largely the result of widespread and entrenched corruption in Argentina, according to Pablo Tesoriere. His new documentary film ‘Fútbol Violencia S.A.’ portrays the barra brava as the “visible face” of an “anonymous society, dedicated, at whatever cost, to control the dirty side of football”. For Tesoriere, current policies are focused on the wrong area: “You won’t solve anything just by throwing barras in prison – there is a series of social networks behind them [...] We need to focus on the internal relationships [the barras have] with club presidents, trade unions and politicians.”

Traces of these shady networks are relatively easy to find. In the superclasico between Boca Juniors and River Plate at the Bombonera earlier this year, the opposing barras to temporarily put aside one of football’s fiercest rivalries to reveal giant flags supporting the Kirchner government’s campaign to make televised football available on public channels. “Clarín: Football is a passion, not a job” was the message from River’s barra brava, supposedly without a trace of irony.

Elsewhere, prominent members of Independiente’s barras are frequently photographed alongside Hugo Moyano, the leader of one of the most powerful unions in the country. The leader of Estudiantes’ barra, Fabián Giannotta, currently under arrest on suspicion of homicide, was formerly a police officer in the provincial of Buenos Aires. When current leader Mauro Martín took control of La Doce in 2007, his first task was to introduce himself to the police department in La Boca.

 

This complex overlapping of vested interests of barras, club presidents and politicians makes it almost impossible to break the code of silence that surrounds the business of football. It’s a situation that Argentina has dealt with before, says Levinsky, and on an even grander scale. “In the military dictatorship [of 1976-83], squads would kidnap people from their homes in the middle of the night, and when family members went to the police station to report it the next day, their statement would be taken by one of the kidnappers. It’s the same in football: if the police you report a crime to are involved with the barra brava, you are not going to find justice.”

Let’s Save Football

Mónica Nizzardo, founder and president of Salvemos al Fútbol, witnessed first-hand the seemingly fruitless pursuit of justice for crimes committed by barra bravas. While working in the press department at Atlanta, a third-division club, Nizzardo was shocked to discover how dominant the barra were, even arranging the player’s contracts without the board of directors ever seeing them.

“I soon realised that if I didn’t denounce what was going on, I’d become complicit,” says Nizzardo. Her decision provoked an unsavoury response. On 17th February 2004, a known member of the barra, on conditional release from jail, entered the club offices while she worked and proceeded to destroy computers and windows with a hammer. “This kind of damage costs a fortune for a small club like Atlanta,” says Nizzardo, before adding an afterthought, “and I was frightened that the hammer blows were coming my way.”

Nizzard wanted to report the crime, but no one in her club would support her. One director told her he couldn’t back her statement because “they know which one my car is”. Others, including at the local police station, warned her about washing dirty laundry in public.

Photo by DanielHP

River Plate Fans

Eventually Nizzard found an ally in former judge Mariano Bergés, who had also found himself isolated and, ultimately, frustrated in his efforts to bring barra bravas, and the club directors who support them, to justice in the 1990s. Together they founded Salvemos al Fútbol in 2006, with the explicit objective of denouncing all cases of violence and corruption to the judiciary. Most of the cases under investigation in the courts today are the result of their work.

A Glimmer Of Hope?

Progress is painstaking in the Argentine judicial system, but SAF has made some important breakthroughs. One example is Osvaldo Domínguez, a policeman and active member of the Comittee for Sports Security in the province of Buenos Aires, who was detained in September for allegedly working illicitly with the barra brava of Estudiantes. But claiming the scalp of one corrupt person is not the same as exposing the rotten core of a corrupt system.

It is ironic, given recent events, that Newell’s Old Boys could be the inspiration for change. In December 2008, notoriously corrupt club president Eduardo Lopez was finally voted out by angry fans – real fans – after ruling for 14 years without elections. It’s a small step in the scheme of things, but meaningful nonetheless as an example of how real football fans, who cheer from the terraces out of love and not for money, can induce positive change.

Argentine football can still be saved; the big question now is whether it wants to be.

For a detailed look at the evolution of Boca Junior’s infamous barra brava, read (in Spanish) Gustavo Grabia’s ‘La Doce: The True Story Of Boca’s Barra Brava’.