2023-05-27 03:01:00
The story is fifty years old. It took place in a convulsed time, of soccer crossed by politics, with Avellaneda as a stage and three presidents in office sitting side by side in the box of the Racing field: Héctor Cámpora, from Argentina; Salvador Allende, from Chile; and Osvaldo Dorticós, from Cuba. The excuse of a classic with Boca had brought them together, which on May 27, 1973 ended 2-0 for the visitor. A photograph froze that moment. El Tío greets with his arms raised – he had taken office in the Casa Rosada 48 hours before -, the socialist who fell in La Moneda three and a half months later peacefully observes the scene and the Cuban smiles. At the upper end of the image you can see three leaders of Peronist orthodoxy, of which only one survives: Juan De Stéfano. The rest are Herminio Iglesias and Manuel Quindimil. The two died within a year of each other in 2007 and 2008.
“I don’t forget what Allende told me that day. I asked him how the revolution was going and he answered me: ‘and… it costs, but we are going to beat the contras like a tough quince.’ Later I found out: the quince is harvested by kicking, what do I know”, says De Stéfano today, former president of the Academy and metalworker unionist in his youth. This 88-year-old man, self-taught, armed and persecuted by the dictatorship after the fall of Isabelita, he never declared with set phrases. Loyal to Perón and Augusto Timoteo Vandor of the UOM, he does not hide his antipathy against Montoneros and the left of the justicialist movement in general.
“At that time I was secretary of the lieutenant governor of the Province of Buenos Aires, Victorio Calabró. That Sunday at the stadium there was quite discreet security. We with the boys saw the faces of the people and knew who could be joking. Herminio was a fan of Boca, Quindimil de Lanús and we looked at each other in the box where the presidents were located. The one I talked to the most was Allende. An endearing guy, like every leader who took charge of the people. You have to love those leaders because they placed themselves on the most difficult side of history. The same as Evita”, says this resident of Sarandí who testified in the trials for crimes against humanity before the Federal Oral Court 1 of La Plata that sentenced the genocidal Miguel Etchecolatz.
The three presidents who saw Boca beat Racing with goals from Hugo Curioni and Enzo Ferrero would have a tragic end after that meeting between a politician and a soccer fan at the Cilindro. Allende died in defense of his legitimate government under the bombs dropped by the coup leaders on the Palacio de La Moneda, on September 11, ’73. Cámpora died in Mexican exile on December 19, 1980 and Dorticós committed suicide in Havana on June 23, 1983.
The Chilean was not a soccer enthusiast, but he understood very well the value of that popular passion. On his trip to Buenos Aires to attend Cámpora’s presidential inauguration at the Casa Rosada, he maintained another close contact with the protagonists of the game. Five days before Racing-Boca, Independiente and Colo Colo played the first of the three finals for the Copa Libertadores (they would follow the rematch in Santiago and the definition at the Centenario stadium in Montevideo). Allende received his country’s team at the embassy in Buenos Aires, as he had done on April 6, ’73 before he traveled to play the cup semifinal in Brazil with Botafogo. He knew the crowds his game drew.
Many years later, Chilean journalist Luis Urrutia O’Nell, alias Chomsky, would hold a curious hypothesis about that Colo Colo: that he delayed the coup against Salvador Allende. He wrote in a book published in November 2012, that the great campaign of the Copa Libertadores runner-up won by Independiente in 1973, he convinced Pinochet’s US advisers to postpone plans for the overthrow of the socialist government.
Cristian Arcos, another Chilean journalist for Radio ADN and a specialist in sports-historical issues, says that “the president was not a regular visitor to matches nor was he affiliated with a club. He wasn’t from Colo Colo in particular either, but yeah He knew the team very well. The one whose players maintain to this day that they were robbed of the Copa Libertadores in the final with Independiente. His players called Allende by his nickname, Don Chicho. With Carlos Caszely, the rebel star, he had a very close relationship”.
If we paraphrase Blas Pascal’s famous maxim about the heart, for reasons that only football understands, the socialist president was involved in two games that were played in Avellaneda five days apart. He was more aware of Colo Colo but the protocol took him to the Cylinder. “Three presidents in our stadium”, titled Racing magazine on its back cover of May 28, ’73.
In a chronicle published in 2022, the journalist Ariel Scher writes that “the governor of the Province of Buenos Aires, Oscar Bidegain (…) and part of the Argentine ministerial team were also present at the classic won by Boca: Foreign Minister Juan Carlos Puig, the head of the Interior, Esteban Righi; that of Social Welfare, José López Rega”. The AFA was controlled by the latter, Perón’s secretary and one of the founders of Triple A. The parapolice force that committed hundreds of crimes and nurtured the task forces of the ’76 dictatorship.
The Argentine president who had assumed office on May 25, 1973 was already weakened a few days after walking the corridors of the Casa Rosada. On June 16 and after the so-called Ezeiza Massacre, they left the exit door open for him. Perón had returned to the country permanently and would die the following year. The Racing stadium bears his name to this day and De Stéfano assures that its leader “wanted to put an athletics track around the playing field that is useless and Ramón Cereijo said no.”
The meeting of the three Latin American presidents took place in that soccer temple, an infrequent event that only occurs occasionally in a World Cup.. The current FIFA would have sanctioned the local club for making explicit policy if Racing and Boca played for an international tournament. Together, Cámpora, Allende and Dorticós would be too much for their selective filter of what is allowed to see on a court.
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