Valley a Fertile Soccer Site
An Amazonian witch doctor named Tzamarenda Naychapi recently toured each of the 12 German stadiums in which World Cup games will be played. He let loose with high-pitched screams to purge evil spirits and bring positive energy to the Ecuadorean team.
Whatever magic Ecuador’s team produces in the tournament starting Friday more likely will be rooted in the barren playing fields here in the Chota Valley, a rocky, impoverished farm area in a river canyon about 80 miles north of Quito. Great soccer players grow here as plentifully as sugar cane and cotton.
Home to no more than 15,000, almost all of them Afro-Ecuadorean, this valley produced five of the 23 players on this year’s national squad, including black stars Agustin Delgado, Edison Mendez and Ulises De La Cruz. In 2002, when Ecuador qualified for the Cup for the first time, eight of the elite players hailed from Chota.
The difficult conditions in which the youths learn to play make them so good, said Delgado’s father, Arturo, 70, who continues to work a five-acre bean farm and live in a modest concrete-block house, despite his son’s affluence and offer to move him to a more comfortable abode in Guayaquil. His son left home at 15 to begin his professional playing career in Venezuela.
There are no grass playing fields in the Chota Valley, only gravelly rock surfaces, the elder Delgado said.
Added Jose Carcelen, a former pro soccer star: “Most kids learn to play with ‘clean feet,’ which is to say with no shoes. It’s an advantage with no grass because the ball rolls faster and boys have to react faster.
“It’s the adversities of growing up here that make us good.”
Another important factor in the national team’s rising fortunes, analysts agree, has been the hiring of Colombian coaches to train the national team over the last decade. Ecuador nearly qualified for the 1998 World Cup under the tutelage of Colombian Coach Francisco Maturana, and then broke through in 2002 under the guidance of another Colombian, Hernan Dario Gomez.
Gomez nearly lost his life for his troubles. He was shot and seriously wounded in 2001 by a supporter of former president Abdala Bucaram for not selecting Bucaram’s son for the national team.
This year’s team has been molded by Luis Fernando Suarez, also of Colombia.
The imported coaches have instilled self-confidence and discipline, said Ricardo Vasconcellos, sports editor at El Universo newspaper in Guayaquil, traits that traditionally were in short supply for the Ecuadorean team.
Most decisive, however, has been the slow integration of black players into the national team, said Rodrigo Paz, a former Quito mayor and president of Ecuador’s strongest soccer club, LDU-Quito. Until the early 1980s, blacks were token presences on the national team, an example of the racism from which the nation still suffers, Arturo Delgado said.
Now, 20 players on the national team are black, Paz said.
“It’s been the incorporation of black players over the last 15 to 20 years that has made the difference,” Paz added.
Until recent years, this valley was as forgotten as its mostly Afro-Ecuadorean residents were poor, uneducated and marginalized. Still poor, the valley at least is known now as a cradle of Ecuadorean soccer. Aid programs funded by current and former players are helping raise affluence and education levels, if only incrementally.
Midfielder De La Cruz, who hails from the Chota Valley village of Piquiucho, donates about $70,000 a year for medical and educational costs for most of the 200 families in his hometown. Despite the fame De La Cruz and others have brought the valley, there still is no permanent medical clinic or drinking water in Piquiucho.
“I do it to see the children of my town smile,” De La Cruz told El Comercio newspaper of Quito last week during a break in the team’s training in Bad Kissingen, Germany, “to help those who live in a place that the authorities have forgotten.”
How and when the valley came to be settled by blacks in this heavily indigenous country is something of a mystery. Some say they sought refuge here after slave ships ran aground on the Ecuadorean coast in the early 19th century, or that they stayed put after emancipation at the nearby San Rafael Caldera hacienda, where they had been forcibly brought to work the crops.
Another theory is that they slowly migrated southward from Colombia to escape that nation’s long running civil wars.
Arnulfo Palacios, 43, himself a black ex-professional player and now a local schoolteacher, said that whatever their roots, soccer is in “every boy’s blood.... When I was 7 years old, I carried rocks for road builders to earn enough money to buy my first soccer ball. Kids do such things to play.”
Broke at the end of his soccer career, Palacios went back to school to get his high school and university diplomas and now dedicates himself to educating local youths here with financial help from a Christian missionary church based in Colorado.
Palacios says he is concerned that the success of local players has produced a “complex” among local youths who think that soccer is the only road to success in life.
“In a way, soccer is only bringing more poverty to the area,” he said, “because if you don’t make it to the big leagues you are left with no education and no opportunity.”
