Violence does love a vacuum, and it don’t get more nihilistic than bloody Buenos Aires football.
[W]hy do people care so much? What is the source of that passion? That, perhaps, is the most uncomfortable question of all. It is commonplace to discuss passion for a football club as an unquestionable good, but how healthy is it, really, for people to tie their self-esteem quite so tightly to the results of a football club?
What does that say for the other institutions from which meaning might be derived?
Can we even call it meaning? Isn’t it just jaw-dripping satisfaction at having eaten one’s enemies?
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Hours after yet more absolutely insane soccer violence, G20 leaders arrive in the city for a summit.
The protests, looting and attacks before the Copa Libertadores final came just days before world leaders — including Presidents Trump, Xi and Macron — descend on the capital for the G-20 summit. The violence raises questions about the city’s preparedness to welcome an expected 8,000 visitors this week.
The team owners, the gangs who run the various game-related rackets, the corrupt police, the corrupt armed forces, the corrupt government – all have too much of a stake in the matches to care about corollary damage. And anyway…. Ours, theirs, in the stands, on the field, on the streets…
As any habitual observer of Argentina’s lower leagues – where police escorts are even skinnier and the headlines at national level sparse – can tell you, barely a match goes by without an away club’s vehicle being subjected to such an attack, with the minimum of repercussions.
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The sadness of Argentina is that it has yet to disprove VS Naipaul, who in the blistering final pages of “Argentina: The Brothels Behind the Graveyard” seethes with disdain for a country that never grew up from being a colony, that worships idols, believes in magic, exemplifies misogynistic machismo, and will never move past a culture of violence, corruption, and plunder. These sentiments are hardly credible descriptions of Argentina’s past, present, or future, but Naipaul’s anger arises from witnessing cultural attitudes that Argentina still cannot entirely deny. There is still too much paranoia, still a tendency to quickly declare enemies, still an unnecessary level of acrimony on display in political life.
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In an entire special section dedicated to the scandal, less than 24 hours after the violence occurred, [a] Nación columnist, Francisco Schiavo, wrote that “this happened right when it should not have happened, with the imminent G20 summit putting the city of Buenos Aires on lockdown. But it happened,” he wrote, “because of who we are as Argentines.”