79 in Guatemala Die in Stampede at Soccer Game

Fans shoving their way into an overcrowded Guatemala City sports stadium buried and suffocated other spectators Wednesday night at a World Cup soccer qualifying game, leaving at least 79 dead and more than 25 injured, according to witnesses.

Bodies of men, women and children were lined up next to the track at Mateo Flores National Stadium after the match was suspended. Firefighters and police lowered the victims from the grandstands.

A stadium employee denied news reports that the Guatemalan Soccer Federation had oversold the game by 10,000 tickets. Only the stadium capacity of 47,000 seats was sold, he insisted.

Still, he said, the government-owned stadium could be suspended as a site of future World Cup events because of the poor organization.

Police had arrested several people for selling forged tickets shortly before the incident, according to the stadium employee, who asked not to be identified.

The incident occurred 45 minutes before the start of the game between Guatemala and Costa Rica, in the early rounds of qualifying games for the 1998 World Cup in France.

Some ticket holders for unreserved seats were barred from entering the crowded stadium. Fans kept out by security guards pushed against the closed doors of the general-admission section in the highest part of the stadium until the doors caved in, sending them tumbling over other spectators.

Those furthest forward were pushed against a retaining fence with such force that it broke, sending some spectators crashing onto the soccer field, according to witnesses.

Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzu, who was scheduled to attend the game along with his Costa Rican counterpart, Jose Maria Figueres, appeared at center field shortly after the incident to suspend the game and ask for a moment of silence. He also declared three days of national mourning.

“This is the most painful moment of my administration,” he said. “This has been a national tragedy. I appeal to the maturity of the Guatemalan people.”

Police said that all of the dead were Guatemalan.

Players were visibly shaken by the deaths. “We cannot play this way,” a weeping Juan Carlos Plata, Guatemala’s star forward, told Costa Rican television.

Tomas Lopez, the chief telephone operator at Roosevelt Hospital in the Guatemalan capital, said eight injured people were brought to the institution, which had been put on maximum alert.

“They [the victims] said that the main door broke down. The crowd [behind it] then piled on top of one another. That caused asphyxiation and lots of blows,” he said by telephone. “It was an avalanche of people.”

He said four hospitals in the capital were receiving victims of the stampede.

Reuters reporter Luis de Leon, who arrived at the scene shortly after the disaster, said he counted 79 dead bodies laid out on the soccer field, including two children.

“It was a very long line,” he said. “They all had their faces covered with clothes.”

He said the stands in the southern section of the stadium, where the tragedy occurred, were littered with shoes and clothing that the victims and others had apparently left in their scramble to avoid the crush.

“Many people were running and screaming,” De Leon said. “There were soldiers and police. The air was filled with police sirens.”

He said relatives of the victims were weeping at the edge of the field. The southern side of the stadium included the cheapest seats, he said.

Witnesses told De Leon that the section was full.

Wednesday’s game was to have been part of a four-nation, round-robin qualifying series also involving Trinidad and Tobago and the United States.

The U.S. team was scheduled to play its final regional qualifying game at the Guatemala stadium Dec. 21. The Guatemalan and U.S. teams also were scheduled to play at RFK Stadium in Washington on Nov. 3 in the first match for the U.S. team in its attempt to qualify for the World Cup.

Steve Sampson, the U.S. national team coach, has made several trips to Guatemala City this year to scout the Guatemalan team and to check on hotel and stadium conditions.

Sampson was with the U.S. team in Lima, Peru, on Wednesday night and could not be reached for comment.

Attempts to reach U.S. Soccer Federation President Alan Rothenberg in Boston were unsuccessful. However, his wife, Georgina, said that Rothenberg was aware of the tragedy and “sick” about it.

There was no word out of U.S. Soccer headquarters in Chicago on Wednesday night regarding possible changes in the qualifying schedule or whether the U.S. will ask for security and ticket-selling procedures to be tightened to avoid any repetition of the tragedy.

Times staff writer Mary Beth Sheridan in Mexico City and Times staff writer Grahame L. Jones in Los Angeles contributed to this story.