Show Goes on, but Colombia’s Copa in the Danger Zone
What a chaotic, corrupt shambles South American soccer has become.
Argentine soccer is bankrupt. Its professional players actually went on strike this year, demanding to be paid the $100 million in wages and bonuses owed to them by clubs.
Brazilian soccer is beset by deception, deceit, denial and, in the words of an ongoing government investigation into how the sport is managed, outright fraud.
As for Colombia, no sadder scenario is imaginable.
Violence and drug-trafficking are endemic and a 37-year-old civil war has claimed more than 40,000 lives in the last decade alone. All too often, targets have been players, referees and federation officials.
In soccer terms, Argentina, Brazil and Colombia are South America’s big three, but the same sort of calamitous situation exists, albeit to a lesser degree, throughout the rest of the continent.
The current debacle known as the Copa America is a prime example of all that is wrong with the sport south of the isthmus of Panama.
Staged every two years--although every four would be better--the competition is the world’s oldest ongoing international soccer tournament, dating from 1916.
Since 1987, the event has been rotated among the continent’s 10 soccer-playing countries, and Colombia has known for more than a decade that it would be the host in 2001.
In recent weeks, however, fears had mounted that the country was not equipped to properly protect visiting teams. A series of bombings that killed a dozen people and injured more than 200 others in the cities where the games were to be played prompted calls for the event to be moved.
There was talk that Brazil, Uruguay or even Mexico, which isn’t a South American country, should stage the tournament.
Precedent for such a decision exists. When Colombia proved incapable of staging the 1986 World Cup, Mexico stepped in as a more-than-adequate substitute host.
But the South American soccer confederation (CONMEBOL) twice voiced its support for Colombia and said Copa America 2001 would stay where it was.
Then, on June 25, Hernan Mejia Campuzano, the 66-year-old vice president of the Colombian soccer federation, was kidnapped.
If Colombia could not protect even its own soccer leaders, some argued, how on earth could it be expected to adequately safeguard the players, coaches, referees, officials and journalists there for the tournament?
CONMEBOL threatened to take the Cup from Colombia unless Mejia Campuzano was released, which he was.
The threat, meanwhile, was enough to bring Colombian President Andres Pastrana right out of his chair. In a national television address, Pastrana blasted the threat as “an insult to our hospitality” and said taking the Cup “is the worst crime they can do to us.”
That, in turn, prompted an emergency meeting of CONMEBOL’s 10 national presidents in Buenos Aires on July 1. After almost three hours of debate, Nicolas Leoz, the organization’s Paraguayan president, announced that a compromise had been reached.
The Copa America would remain in Colombia but would be postponed until next year.
It was a ridiculous decision. If the killing, the kidnapping and the cocaine have not been eradicated over decades, they certainly are not going to be eliminated in a few months.
Not only that, the planned new date meant the Copa America would be played in a year when the World Cup will be held in Japan and South Korea, further cluttering and confusing the international soccer calendar.
“This is a victory for good over evil,” proclaimed Alvaro Fina, president of the Colombian soccer federation. “If we had lost the Copa, we would have given a passport to terrorism.”
In a land where leftist guerrillas and right-wing death squads are equally murderous, such a comment is little more than absurd.
But the soap opera was not over. In fact, it got worse.
On Thursday, five days after announcing its decision, CONMEBOL inexplicably reversed its position and said the Copa America would go ahead as originally planned.
In other words, it will be played in Colombia starting Wednesday and running through July 29.
The reversal, some said, was prompted by immense pressure by corporate sponsors and television interests. In other words, soccer’s strings were being pulled by those with money, not soccer or even safety, at heart.
“It’s a painful situation to recognize,” Armando Estrada, Colombia’s Interior Minister, told Reuters, “but he who puts up the cash, calls the shots.”
After the earlier postponement, national teams released their players, allowing them to either go on vacation or return to their European clubs for preseason training. The event’s sudden revival caused chaos.
Argentina, the strongest of the South American teams and the favorite, even with the second-string team it was sending, said Thursday it would not participate.
Canada, an invited guest along with Mexico, followed suit Friday, thereby reducing the 12-nation field to 10 and causing CONMEBOL to frantically scrape around for substitutes to fill the schedule. Costa Rica and Honduras were contacted and Costa Rica agreed Saturday to take Canada’s place.
Brazil said it will bring federal agents to travel with the team wherever it goes and German club Bayern Munich, citing concerns for its players, will not allow forwards Giovane Elber of Brazil and Claudio Pizarro of Peru to play in the tournament.
Meanwhile, Pastrana, Colombia’s president, again went on television and made political hay of the turmoil.
“We are going to defeat violence and the violent minority,” he said, waving a Colombian national team jersey and calling the tournament the “cup of peace.”
That remains to be seen.
The game sites will resemble battle zones rather than sporting venues. About 20,000 members of the armed forces and secret police will provide security, bomb-sniffing dogs will be everywhere, there will be armored cars roaming the streets and police snipers positioned at the stadiums.
And if CONMEBOL did indeed cave in to the threat of lawsuits from television and sponsors, here’s something else it should start worrying about:
Just imagine the lawsuits that will follow if other top European clubs find one or more of their multimillion-dollar players kidnapped or otherwise harmed just because the CONMEBOL was afraid to tell Colombia it is no place to hold an international sporting event of any kind.
