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Arsenal 2 Everton 2
I’ve just been watching Arsenal v Everton on the TV in my shorts, no shirt and an ice-cold drink in my hand. There’s nothing quite like seeing those sixty-thousand or so frozen, wool-wrapped fans huddled together like penguins having a bad day while all those around me are complaining about the excessive southern hemisphere summer heat.
 Punta del Este-for those who can afford it They get so hot and bothered down here in January that all those who can head for the Atlantic beach resorts – those with a few pesos to rub together go to Punte del Este in Uruguay or to Brazil, while the rest head for resorts on the Argentine coast.
Those of us who have stayed behind in Buenos Aires can enjoy emptier streets and plazas and shorter queues at the ice-cream parlours. We’re also being treated to a spectacular political drama.
President Cristina Kirchner wanted six-and-a-half billion dollars from the national reserve to pay off a chunk of Argentina’s huge foreign debt which is due later this year. But the head of the central bank, Martin Redrado, told her to keep her hands to herself.
She stormed off in a huff and announced that Mr Redrado had resigned – only he hadn’t. “It’s my job,” he said, “and I’m keeping it.”
So the president signed a special decree to have him removed. But she needed the signatures of her cabinet to make it valid. However, they were at the beach, working on their tans, making sand-castles, sipping cocktails etc and had to be dragged back to Buenos Aires, sand between their toes, sun-cream on their noses and tans less than complete.
Then a judge nullified the decree and Mr Redrado went back to work. It’s not over yet and as we count the days until the start of the new football season, it’s keeping us amused.
 Redrado-should he stay or should he go? Those players not captured by the European club nets that trawl Argentina at this time of the year are back in training. Running through Bosque de Palermo the other day, I saw the River Plate squad going through their paces. I know it’s early, but I think I’m in better condition than most of them.
You probably think I’m making this up, but as I stood at the edge of the lake recovering from my run I saw two turtles having sex in the water. At least I think they were. How do you know they’re not fighting, one on the other’s back applying the turtle equivalent of a half-nelson? Or were they dancing a slow, slow tango? On reflection, it was definitely sex, proof that there’s still plenty of fun to be had in a half-empty, football-free, hot and humid Buenos Aires, for the turtles at least.
The extreme heat is punctuated by thunder storms which, as well as relieving the humidity, wash away the dog shit which has become one of the most irritating aspects of life in Buenos Aires.
Much of the population lives in apartment blocks, highly inappropriate for keeping dogs, often big, hairy ones totally unsuited to the heat. Crime is an issue but it’s not nearly as bad as some porteños, as the residents of Buenos Aires call themselves, will tell you it is. Plenty of the more paranoid residents buy their pets as guard-dogs. Others love their pooches dearly. But they’re often too lazy, busy or scared to walk them, so will hire a professional dog walker to do it for them.
It’s a common sight in Buenos Aires to see a walker with up to fifteen assorted poodles, Labradors, Chihuahuas, Great Danes and terriers straining at their leashes and dumping all over the pavements. Of course, the walkers are supposed to clean up but they rarely do.
 Dogs' Life This business has become so lucrative that many walkers now use vans to pick up their charges and drive them to the park. There, they’re tied up to trees while the walkers chat with fellow walkers, drink mate tea and perhaps kick a ball around. I know this because they gather in the park where I run. Overnight the area is used by prostitutes who discard the used condoms among the trees and by day by the dog-walkers who don’t walk. Runners are advised to tread very carefully.
The park cleaners have a tough job, but so too do the journalists who have to fill the sports pages during the summer months. There’s no cricket here, so they cover the pointless triangular pre-season tournaments being played at the beach resorts or tell tales of new shirt designs or who is joining the annual exodus to Europe.
The football may be taking a break but the battle between rival fans never rests. If you saw the World Club championship final between Barcelona and Argentina’s Estudiantes last month you may have wondered why some of the fans had banners with a simple 7-0 on them.
Estudiantes may have won the South American Libertadores cup and reached the pinnacle of world football with a final against Barcelona, but a game their fans revel in more than any other was the 7-0 victory in 2006 over their rivals in the city of La Plata, Gimnasia y Esgrima.
A young Gimnasia fan, Maxi Vazquez, sent a photo of himself wearing the club shirt to get his national identity card renewed. But his new card was processed by an Estudiantes fan who scrawled 7-0 on the photo before stamping and coating it with plastic. Maxi was livid. The offending official was tracked down and fired, despite a support campaign on Facebook that attracted more than eight-hundred and fifty fans.
I don’t know whether there’s a park in La Plata where turtles have sex but that former official now has plenty of time on his hands to investigate while he waits for the referee to blow that first whistle of the season.
I, meanwhile, think I’ll plop another ice-cube in my glass. Que calor!
 The Feminine Touch Reds 4 Yellows 2
In Argentina they call them Villas Miseria – Misery Towns – rambling, ramshackle communities built on somebody else’s land with stolen bricks and cement, corrugated iron roofs and poor drainage. Spider webs of electricity and telephone cables criss-cross the sky.
The oldest, biggest and most firmly established shanty-town in Buenos Aires is Villa 31, kind of squeezed behind the main long-distance bus terminal and alongside the tracks leading out of the Retiro railway station.
Me, I know no fear and with little regard for my own safety, I strode boldly into the narrow alleyways of Villa 31 to bring you a first-hand account of life where lesser men fear to tread.
A West Ham United baseball cap is usually all it takes to keep potential attackers at bay. Those crossed hammers translating in any language into ‘Don’t Mess With Me, Sucker!”
The fact that I was met on the outskirts of the shanty-town by a petite young woman called Carolina who works in the labyrinthine streets of Villa 31 armed with no more than a friendly smile and a willingness to make a difference should not detract from my undoubted bravery.
I was also accompanied by my kids, Benja, aged 12, and Lucas, 9, who has just passed his first Tae-Kwon do exam with flying colours, and Aunty Marilyn visiting from London.
Carolina works for an NGO called Goals for Girls/Metas para las Chicas that helps the girls and young women of the community to play football.
“Football,” I hear you gasp. “In Argentina! Now there’s a novelty.” But the truth is that it’s a man’s game here. Women in Argentina grow up with football, their dads and brothers play it, watch it, obsess about it, their boyfriends and husbands may even drag them to games and will still expect their dinner on the table afterwards, but women in general are not encouraged to play it. Those that defy convention and insist are given very little space in which to kick a ball.
 The Goal... Playing football in the Villa gives the girls that space. They practise regularly and play matches at the weekend. They are also given talks on the benefits of exercise and healthy eating in order to be better footballers but also to be healthier people in an environment where simply staying alive and finding the next meal is often the primary concern.
But it ain’t easy. A dusty dirt pitch has been marked out, surrounded on three sides by precarious looking houses and on the fourth by a brightly painted church. They’ve got two proper goals with nets and a bag of balls which are kept locked in a wooden cupboard.
The referee for this game between the reds and the yellows called in sick and a brief search ensued for a suitable mug, someone easy to abuse and too old and slow to keep up with the action, to fill the void. That honour fell to me. I vowed to be firm but fair but was mostly simply ignored.
The skill levels were high and the players were fierce but fair. Men pushing bikes, teenage boys smoking joints and on the prowl and women returning from shopping nonchalantly strolled across the field. Gangs of boys regularly started their own matches by the corner flags, gradually spreading out onto the pitch.
The female players are forced to look after kid brothers and sisters and kickoffs are delayed because the players have to complete household chores, ‘women’s work,’ before they’re allowed out. Football, they’re told, is for boys.
But the girls are not listening. With the help of Goals for Girls they’re expanding and developing. About thirty of them play regularly, organising games against female teams from other shanty-towns. They’ve established links with women’s football federations from other countries and there’s the constant battle to raise funds for transport, kit and footballs.
It’s impossible to say with any certainty how many people live in Villa 31 because the residents don’t take kindly to questioners with clipboards delving into their lives and it’s a community that grows pretty much daily — with migrants arriving from Argentina’s poor northern provinces, squeezed off the land by drought and the ever more voracious soya producers. They’re joined by Paraguayans, Bolivians and Peruvians attracted to one of the wealthiest cities in Latin America.
It’s not a place you’d want to find yourself wandering in after dark. Most Porteños, as the residents of Buenos Aires call themselves, have seen Villa 31 from the train or from one of the long-distance buses taking them on their holidays to the coast or the mountains but few have ever set foot there, or would want to.
A dark mystique has grown up about the villas of Buenos Aires, fed by tales of the criminal gangs operating there, the crack cocaine factories, the teenage pregnancies, the murders.
 The Church View Manchester City’s Carlos Tevez grew up in Fort Apache, one of the city’s most notorious villas, and has told of how he’d lie awake at night listening to gunfire. All the stories that seep out into the affluent northern neighbourhoods are no doubt true. But there is another rarely told side to life in Argentina’s shanty towns.
The vast majority of residents are honest people fighting against the odds to give their children the opportunities they never had. They put great store by personal hygiene and are generally polite and generous to visitors.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not getting all romantic about shanty-town life. I’ve visited a few and am not about to fork out the US$10,000 that houses in Villa 31 reportedly sell for. The residents are neglected, exploited and ignored. But they’re not hopeless.
I blew the final whistle and walked off the pitch for a well-earned ice-cold bottle of water. The players didn’t seem to notice my departure and, despite the intense heat and humidity, kept playing – until they were called home to prepare lunch or look after a young sibling. The last stragglers were finally forced from the pitch by a torrential downpour.
Pictures by Benja
Goals for Girls website: http://www.democraciarepresentiva.org
For More: http://www.santelmoproductions.com/en/#/portfolio/goals_for_girls
Argentinos Juniors 5 Huracan 1
And so ends this journey through an Argentine first division football season. But my word, what a way to end it! The sun was shining, the Argentinos Juniors fans were in fine voice, Huracan supporters had travelled in numbers and there were goals galore. The home side went ahead after just eight minutes with a debatable penalty slotted home with confidence by the consistently impressive, Nestor Ortigoza. The Bichos were two up by half time thanks to a Juan Mercier strike from the middle of the penalty area. In the second half they passed the ball exquisitely to shouts of ‘Ole’ from the home supporters. Gabriel Hauche notched up a hat-trick.
 I shall miss you.... It’s long been my ill-researched theory that football in so many ways is a reflexion of real-life – all contained within the confines of the stadium. You experience all the hopes, the anger, the expectation, the exhilaration, the disappointment and the unpleasant smells of life on the outside. Only you do it vicariously, safely, through the actions of the players and the officials and that obnoxious bloke with the huge belly who keeps shouting the same insult at the referee throughout the game.
It therefore follows, in my malt-whisky addled mind, that a league will reflect the characteristics of the country in which it’s played.
The English premiership, with its dodgy club owners, glitzy corporate executive boxes, expensive foreign imports and greasy cuisine, I think sustains my theory.
The Argentine league, like the country itself, should be up there with the big boys, but isn’t. It’s become a seedbed for foreign clubs to come in and exploit. A few clubs thrive but the majority are victims of their owners’ greed and ineptitude, further weakened by their rotten barrabrava, the organised, hardcore fans.
Grounds are decrepit and no-one ever adequately explains where all the transfer money goes, however politely you ask them. But the depth of player talent is awesome, the atmosphere on match-days is never less than interesting and the passion for and knowledge of football is second to none.
The weekend newspapers said that this season’s climax was more exciting than ever. They always say that. For some weeks there had been a two-horse race for the title between Newell’s Old Boys and humble Banfield, with Newell’s going into their final game two points adrift.
Playing at home, they had to beat San Lorenzo and hope that Banfield wouldn’t get a result away to Boca Juniors. Both lost their games 2-0 and Banfield, for the first time in their history, were crowned Argentine champions. Buenos Aires was awash in a sea of green and white.
 Huracan - Glowing like a soggy sparkler The season was marked by the big clubs, Boca Juniors, River Plate, Racing Club and Independiente, all failing to challenge at the top and all bobbing about in mid-table. An Argentine side, Estudiantes, did win the South American club championship, the Copa Libertadores, and the national team snuck into the World Cup with a less-than impressive fourth automatic qualifying place. But with Dumpy Diego at the helm the journey to South Africa was always going to be a strain on the suspension.
Argentinos Juniors, after finishing in last place last season, could only get better and they did so in style, finally resting in sixth place. For one brief moment, halfway through the season after a win against Estudiantes, the Bichos fans even whispered about perhaps, just maybe, you never know, winning their first silverware in more than twenty years. But then, like a Maradona diet, it all came to nothing, with a rash of draws against teams from the soggy section of the table.
The man I mocked at the beginning of the season, the lumbering awkward Number 5, Nestor Ortigoza, has become my favourite player for his precision, intelligent passing and willingness to battle for every ball. I shall follow him with interest in the Paraguay squad in South Africa.
The little goalscorer, Gabriel Hauche, was also impressive – too impressive, I fear, to linger for long at Argentinos Juniors. I’ll be surprised if he pulls on a Bichos shirt next season. The other man unlikely to be stretching the red and white shirt over his expansive belly is the manager, Claudio Borghi, who I suspect will be plucked from his dugout by one of the vultures from Argentina’s big, underachieving clubs.
There was much less crowd violence this season. And all the matches finished on time, despite a delayed start to the season because of a crisis over television rights and coverage.
Argentina is a bit like that. Things rarely progress as you would like them to. But after false starts and prophesies of doom, gloom and corruption, everything tends to work out alright in the end.
 This is the end In the week the season ended, the trial finally began of one of the most hated figures from Argentina’s military dictatorship, Alfredo Astiz, a former naval commander, known as the ‘Blond Angel of Death.’ He operated at the Naval Mechanics School, the biggest and most gruesome detention centre where he’s accused of killing, among others, two French nuns.
He also led an elite squadron during the Falklands War. He surrendered without firing a shot to British troops in South Georgia. It’s taken more than thirty years to bring him and his cohorts to trial. But after sustained pressure from the families of the victims and human rights groups, and some help from the government, it finally happened.
I went to fourteen of the nineteen games this season. There was some fine football, just one 0-0 draw in the rain, a few appalling refereeing decisions and a fair number of chorizo sausages which make me wince to think about them even now.
It was a respectable season for Argentinos Juniors that, with a little more luck and self-belief could have been a much better one. They drew against the eventual champions, Banfield, 1-1 and beat the runners-up, Newell’s Old Boys 1-0 away.
I shall be retiring to my hammock for the summer break but I hope to return early next year, rested and rejuvenated, for another season and a preview of the World Cup from the terraces of the Diego Armando Maradona stadium.
Independiente 1 Argentinos Juniors 1
This game entailed a trip across the stinking Riachuelo river that marks the border of the city of Buenos Aires with the Avellaneda neighbourhood in the province of Buenos Aires. I was at the home of Independiente whose brand new stadium is right next door to rivals, Racing Club.
And a fine stadium it will be too, when it’s finished. Which is more than can be said of the team, which was one of the worst I’ve seen this season. This game was there for the taking but Argentinos Juniors didn’t take it. They won almost everything in midfield but then dillied and dallied and dithered on the edge of the penalty area.
 Always with Argentinos Juniors... The home side took the lead thirty-five minutes into the second half with a Dario Gandin goal. I was contemplating the long journey home with the taste of defeat in my mouth when, in the last minute of the game, Gonzalo Prosperi, popped home a headed equaliser. And well deserved it was too. At least I thought so.
Funny name, Prosperi. I’m not sure where it’s from. But generally you can scan any Argentine team sheet for a fair reflexion of where this nation of forty million people came from. The Independiente squad has a Gomez, a Sanchez and a Velazquez. Argentinos Juniors have a Garcia, a Salazar and a Fernandez. The Spanish names always lead the way.
They’re always followed by Italian. Argentinos has a Gianni and Independiente a Piatti. Tens of thousands of Italian immigrants, most of them from the south, flooded into Argentina from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards and probably make up the majority in the major cities of Buenos Aires and Rosario.
The Argentinos squad also boasts a German sounding Oberman, a French Mercier and an eastern European Pavlovich. While Independiente has a Kruspzky and a very English-sounding Wade.
There are an estimated one million Paraguayans living in Argentina, mostly labourers and domestic workers. The Argentinos Juniors number five, Nestor Ortigoza, is Argentine born and bred but will play for Paraguay in the 2010 World Cup since that’s where his father is from.
There are also more than a million immigrants from neighbouring Bolivia. Nearly every fruit and vegetable shop is Bolivian run and the Liniers neighbourhood, home to the Velez Sarsfield club, has one of the biggest Bolivian markets outside of the Andean country.
A huge proportion of Uruguay’s three-and-a-half million population lives in Buenos Aires, indistinguishable to my eye from the locals, unless you happen to spot them wearing a Uruguayan Penarol or Nacional football shirt.
Nearly all the independent supermarkets are Chinese run and Buenos Aires does have a small but lively Chinatown. But these are relatively recent arrivals and I’ve yet to see a player of Chinese origin break into a major Argentine football team.
Argentina has the largest Jewish population in Latin America – more than two-hundred thousand last time I counted. They’re mostly descendants of those escaping the late nineteenth century East European pogroms, with a second wave fleeing Nazi Germany and a third, smaller wave of Holocaust survivors.
Other escapees from persecution were the Armenians who still parade their extremely long surnames around their own neighbourhood in downtown Buenos Aires.
Argentines like to have the biggest of everything. So when Carlos Menem, whose family is Syrian-Lebanese, was president in the nineteen-nineties he ensured that Buenos Aires would have the biggest mosque in Latin America.
While travelling in the northern province of Salta a few years ago I stopped at a remote store where a bare-chested man behind the counter told me his name was Sam the Syrian. His family had emigrated to Chicago in the nineteen-twenties but had somehow fallen foul of Al Capone and fled to this remote corner of Argentina.
Capone’s men, I’m sure, gave up the search long ago and I should have told Sam that it was safe to move on. But he seemed happy where he was.
There are however two groups you won’t find many of in Argentina. The only black people you’re likely to come across on the streets of Buenos Aires are Brazilian or US tourists. Yet in the first half of the nineteenth century, one-third of the population of Buenos Aires were either African slaves or descendants of African slaves.
Neighbouring Uruguay and Bolivia both have small black communities. Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and of course Brazil have large ones. So what happened to Argentina’s black population?
It’s a question that has never been properly answered. Before the Europeans arrived, Argentina like North America was populated by indigenous tribes. And like their North American counterparts they lived on land craved by the white arrivals and had souls demanded by the Christian missionaries.
Throughout the nineteenth century Argentina was in an almost constant state of war. Those against the native Indians were as fierce and bloody as any romanticised in Hollywood Westerns.
After slavery was abolished in Argentina in 1813 many black men had few options and often joined the army. They were led by Juan Manual de Rosas who consistently put his black soldiers in the front line where they became cannon fodder. Rosas, who died in Southampton in 1877, was not solely responsible for wiping out Argentina’s black population. Disease, especially yellow fever, and assimilation also played their part. But I really don’t think Rosas’s face should be adorning the Argentine twenty peso note.
 Rosas. Worth twenty? The traces of Argentina’s indigenous population can be seen in the faces of those from the interior of the country, mixed with those of the Spanish conquerors and the waves of immigration that came afterwards. With the industrialisation of Buenos Aires in the first half of the twentieth century, many of these darker skinned Argentines moved to the cities where they’re to be found in neighbourhoods like Avellaneda.
What remains of the pure indigenous population – the Toba, Mapuche, Guarani and Wichi – are marginalised, forgotten, abused and exploited on the fringes of Argentina society.
The wealthy residents of what the guide books call Buenos Aires’s European style neighbourhoods – in the north of the city – are generally not even aware that Argentina still has an Indian population – and even if they did would be unlikely to care that some are still dying of preventable illnesses and starvation.
It was on that happy note that I trudged my way home through the streets of Avellaneda after a match that finished just before midnight, warmed by that last minute equaliser and the knowledge that sometimes justice, even if it’s only on the football pitch, can be done.
Argentinos Juniors 2 San Lorenzo 1
How I’ve reached the seventeenth game of the Argentine football season without mentioning tango I really don’t know. It’s either a gift or I’ve been criminally negligent. But the time has finally come for me to pull on my fishnet stockings and stiletto heels and rectify my lapse to a two by four beat.
San Lorenzo are from the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Boedo – the cradle, many will tell you, of the tango. An equal number will tell you that that’s as bogus as a French World Cup qualifying goal. But the barrio does boast a fair number of bars, street corners and lamp posts, for all I know, named after tango legends such as Osvaldo Pugliese and Homero Manzi. And there’s a whole bunch of famous tango songs which mention Boedo.
 Carlos Gardel Whether tango gets your feet tapping or not, there’s no doubt that it’s an intrinsic part of the Buenos Aires culture and nightlife. You realise that slumped in the back of a taxi at three on a Sunday morning as the driver wrecks his suspension over the cobbled streets with a Carlos Gardel song playing on the radio.
Gardel is the Sinatra, the Presley, the Dylan of tango. If the bars and cafes of Argentina are adorned with three pictures, then you can pretty much guarantee that one will be Diego Maradona, another Evita and the third Carlos Gardel.
He was a cool dude and no mistake, an early superstar with his slicked-back hair and dapper suits. There is some dispute over whether he was born in France or Uruguay but there’s no doubt that he grew up in Argentina. He was what they called in those days ‘a ladies’ man.’ There are rumours that he also served time in prison. Gardel toured Europe in the nineteen twenties and made a couple of Hollywood films in the thirties. Then, like all true superstars, he met an early death — in a plane crash in Medellin, Colombia, in 1935.
There’s a statue of him by his grave in the Chacarita cemetery near my house where admirers regularly place a fresh cigarette in his hand.
Forget your sequinned ballroom tango – the real thing is both sexy and seedy. That’s not surprising when you consider its roots in the bars and brothels of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. That’s where Gardel found and nurtured it before helping to make tango music international.
 It Takes Two... At the end of the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of European immigrants were flooding into Argentina. Some were fleeing squalor and persecution, others were filled with dreams about what they might do in a land with huge unfulfilled potential.
There were far more men than women and many spent their well-earned wages on their well-earned days off at the brothels. Business was brisk and there was a fair amount of waiting around. The more considerate Madams provided musical entertainment and that, so the story goes, is where the men perfected their tango dance moves – dancing with other men since the women were busy.
There’s another story that the dance developed as the men practised their knife fighting moves. The jerkiness of the dance, especially when that stiletto flicks up between your legs to within a whisker of your most sensitive parts, may lend some credence to that theory.
The truth is that the early days of tango were not well documented which leaves us open to rumour and conjecture. I’ve been told that that tango touches the soul. Not mine, I’m afraid. That’s only ever happened to me at Upton Park and then very, very rarely.
Tango has spread around the world – to Japan, France, the United States and Finland. Hundreds of dancers come to Buenos Aires every year to immerse themselves in the roots of the dance and the music. One woman with a tango school in Holland once told me that she came to Argentina every year to ‘top up her tango mojo.’ Its avid practioners will claim that it’s changed their lives.
People have often told me that I should take advantage of the fact that I live in Buenos Aires and learn to dance tango. But I’m wise enough to know two things. Firstly, that there are people who can dance and then that there are people who should never dance if they don’t want to embarrass themselves and those around them. I fall into the second category. And the second thing I know is that you should write down the things that you know since, with age, you’re liable to forget them.
Buenos Aires these days is awash with tango shows, huge spectaculars in which tourists can watch some of finest dancers and listen to the best musicians that Argentina has to offer. The tourist boom has given it fresh impetus, with tango schools springing up to cater for youngsters who want to follow a career in fishnet stockings.
From the sixties onwards, with the invasion of European and American rock and then the development of the home-grown variety, a whole generation of Argentines rebelled against tango. Many are returning now, ignoring their parents who know nothing, and instead turning to their grandparents to teach them the old steps.
 Tango Paraphernalia The real thing never really went away. It’s practised in milongas – dance schools, often running in the afternoon, where you receive lessons before launching into an orgy of tango dance and music. Everyone dances with everyone else. As the classes end, it’s common for gangs of elderly, dapper gentlemen with Clark Gable moustaches to turn up looking for an eligible female dance partner.
It’s all about tango talent and it’s not unusual to see a short seventy-something year-old man in a suit he’s been wearing since 1952 with his face lost in the cleavage of a tall blonde twenty-year old.
Very Benny Hill, until they start dancing. If they’ve got it, then size, age and language don’t matter.
This was an interesting game on a damp, cold day, far too chilly for fishnets. San Lorenzo took the lead with a Pablo Pintos goal in the first half when the Argentinos defence looked like they were playing in tango high-heels and simply gave the ball away. But the home side found their rhythm in the second half with some well-choreographed moves. The equaliser came from a Facundo Coria free-kick on the edge of the penalty area. The second looked from where I was standing like a Gustavo Oberman cross that somehow ended up in the net. But who’s complaining?
This was an impressive victory against one of the so-called Buenos Aires Big Five. The other four, although I shouldn’t have to tell you, being Boca, River, Independiente and Racing.
Gimnasia y Esgrima 1 Argentinos Juniors 2
Phew! What a relief. The Red Bugs finally returned to winning ways after six games. And well deserved it was too. However they play out the last few games of the season, Argentinos are assured of comfortable mid-table safety but nonetheless played this one with passion. Gimnasia fear relegation and needed to win, but were simply not very good.
They took the lead fifteen minutes into the second half with a goal from Jose Vizcarra who was left unmarked in the penalty area from a Gimnasia corner. Argentinos equalised with an offside goal from Gabriel Hauche. Then Gonzalo Prosperi scored the winner with a back-heeler off the post while he was lying on the ground, if you can picture that!
This match was played in the city of La Plata, about an hour south of Buenos Aires, and home to two first division sides – Gimnasia y Esgrima and the current South American champions, Estudiantes.
It’s a pleasant university city with a fine cathedral. It’s also the home town of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and a museum housing some of the best dinosaur finds anywhere in the world.
But it’s a place that I’ll always associate with the worst excesses of Argentine police corruption and brutality.
The tone was set by Miguel Etchecolatz, the chief of police in the city during military rule in Argentina between 1976 and 1983. It’s difficult to compile a list of the worst abusers of human rights during a nightmare in which an estimated thirty-thousand people were kidnapped, tortured and killed. But Etchecolatz would certainly figure in the top ten.
He was sentenced in 2006 to life in prison for kidnap, torture and murder. The day before the sentence, a retired labourer, Julio Lopez, a victim of torture who had given evidence at the trial, disappeared. He’s not been seen since.
 Where is Julio Lopez? There has been a huge campaign across Argentina for information about his whereabouts but his family suspect he was abducted by supporters of the military regime, police officers or former police officers sending a stark message to other potential witnesses in the countless human rights trials clogging up the country’s legal system. It later transpired that judges, lawyers and other witnesses in the Etchecolatz trial were threatened.
In December last year investigators discovered the remains of hundreds of people at a former detention centre just behind a police station in La Plata. They said the evidence showed that the bodies were thrown into a pit, covered in fuel then set alight alongside tyres to cover the smell of burning flesh.
The day the discovery was announced I found myself in the course of my duties as the then BBC South America correspondent in a mini-van distributing condoms to the transvestite street workers of La Plata. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7793183.stm) I was travelling with ex and current prostitutes who were running their own health clinic for the city’s sex workers.
La Plata has a thriving sex trade, catering for all tastes. Many of the men and women, usually from neighbouring Paraguay or Argentina’s poor, northern provinces, are coerced into the industry. A large number are underage, working in seedy hovels at the end of dirt roads on the outskirts of the city.
I visited one brothel – a co-operative run by a group of men and women – near the centre of the city. My host told me that he paid the local police four-hundred dollars a month for protection.
“Protection from what?” I asked him.
“They tell me, it’s protection from third parties,” he replied.
I think it’s fair to say that most Argentines have a poor opinion of their police forces and do their best to steer clear of them. Of course, that’s not always possible.
One friend told me her great aunt had died. I expressed my condolences and asked when the funeral would be.
“We don’t know,” I was told. “We’re trying to raise the money to pay the police for the certificate to release the body.”
The old lady had died of natural causes but the bureaucracy demands a certificate to verify that. With a combination of grief and the knowledge that any complaint will only meet more bureaucracy, the family decided it was easier simply to pay the bribe and move on.
The corruption is so endemic that it’s difficult to know where any reform of the system would start, should the political will ever arise to confront it.
I came across corruption at its lowest level on a simple trip to a new takeaway restaurant in my neighbourhood to buy some empanadas – little pasties filled with meat, cheese or tuna. The policeman in front of me collected his food and walked out without paying.
“He gets them for free?” I asked the cook.
“If we don’t want problems,” he shrugged. “He gets a few free samples a couple of times a week for him and his mates.”
There are no doubt some fine Argentine police officers. Many brave men are killed every year in the line of duty. And if, by any chance, you are an Argentine police man or woman reading this blog, I’m sure you are one of the good ones.
The city of Buenos Aires government, sick of being policed by the national men and women in blue, has been trying to establish its own force. But it’s become embroiled in farce even before a Buenos Aires bobby has collared his first villain.
 Thin Blue Line The first proposed boss, Jorge Palacios, had to resign and is under investigation for allegedly covering up evidence after the attack on the Jewish culture centre in Buenos Aires in 1994 that killed more than eighty people. Another major police player is embroiled in a phone tapping scandal.
The new police force is the baby of the mayor of Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri, who in 1991 was himself kidnapped – by a gang of policemen. In fact, the assumption when anyone is kidnapped in Argentina is usually that current or former police officers are somehow involved.
My only brush with the local law was some years ago on my first visit to Argentina when the taxi I was travelling in with my wife and her aunt was pulled over by a traffic cop. He was a corpulent fellow who pointed a machine gun at us as we lined up against the wall. It might have been nerves but I found myself giggling, until my wife whispered that I’d need to present some form of ID. Not to do so was a criminal offence.
All I had on me was my Hackney library card – I never left the house without it – which you won’t be surprised to learn impressed our interrogator no end. He sent us on our way with a cheery smile. Nowadays I’d use my Argentinos Juniors membership card.
Anyway, back to the football. The previous leaders, Banfield, on Sunday lost their unbeaten record with a 2-1 home defeat to Racing Club. So Newell’s Old Boys took advantage with a 1-0 win over Colon to go top of the table with just three games to go.
Argentinos Juniors 1 Arsenal 1
No, obviously not THAT Arsenal. This is the Argentine Arsenal from the Buenos Aires suburb of Sarandi. They play in blue and red, are not managed by a Frenchman, have passionate support and have achieved very little since their foundation in 1957. There’s not even any evidence that their foundation was inspired by the London Arsenal.
But for the purposes of this article, I like to think that it was. And even if it wasn’t, there’s plenty of evidence of the British influence on the foundation and establishment of football in Argentina. So, how do they thank us for it? With the Hand of God! That’s how!
That evidence is first of all in the English words in the club names – Boca Juniors, River Plate, Newell’s Old Boys and my own personal favourite, Chaco For Ever, from the northern city of Resistencia and currently top of the regional third division.
Then across the river in Uruguay you’ve got Liverpool and in Bolivia another corker, The Strongest. Bolivia also boasts Blooming but I’m not sure whether that derives from ‘Blooming Marvellous’ or ‘Blooming Crap.’
The man credited with introducing the Argentines to football was a Glasgow-born schoolteacher, Alexander Watson Hutton, who arrived in 1882 and set up the Buenos Aires English High School. It was and still is part of a network of schools modelled on the British public school system with all the elitism, snobbery and croquet and cucumber sandwiches on the lawn that comes with it.
The school was represented by the Alumni Football Team and would play the likes of Rosario Cricket Club and the Buenos Aires Football Club, founded by Yorkshireman, Don Thomas Hogg in 1867.
Other clubs sprouted up like a rash of handballs in the French team, but it was still very much a ‘gentleman’s’ sport and awfully British.
Many years ago I worked on the English-language newspaper, The Buenos Aires Herald. Asked to call the estate of an Anglo-Argentine family to get the bridge results, or something, a woman answered the phone in the kind of posh English accent that only the Queen uses these days. She was probably one of the last members of a remote corner of the British Empire.
There is a British cemetery in Buenos Aires, tea-houses with frightfully English sounding names and a now semi-derelict department store downtown called Harrods, which bears no relation to the Knightsbridge original.
 Southampton - taught us everything we know. The other great thing the British brought the Argentines was the railways. A stroll around the Retiro station in Buenos Aires reveals buffers cast in Ipswich, steel girders produced in Liverpool and clocks made in London, which stopped about the time Argentinos Juniors last won a trophy.
There are still quaint railway stations in the Buenos Aires suburbs which look like they’ve been plucked straight out of the Suffolk countryside. And place names such as Coghlan, Hurlingham, City Bell and Open Door, which are pronounced in strong Spanish accents, making them unintelligible to English speakers.
There is still a strong British influence in agriculture here but what caused and still causes the most discomfort for what’s left of the Anglo-Argentine community was the 1982 invasion of the Falkland or Malvinas Islands. In the aftermath of Argentina’s eventual defeat some of the Johns and Georges started calling themselves Juan and Jorge. The English tower, a major Buenos Aires landmark donated by the British government, was renamed.
But the British influence on the foundation of football in Argentina remains. Its initial introduction by the toffs was consolidated by the British railway workers who played during their breaks in front of their bemused Argentine colleagues. The first reported game of football in Argentina was between two teams of railway workers, the White Caps and the Red Caps. I don’t know the result. I imagine the local workers, many of them Spanish and Italian immigrants, then realised: “Hey, we can do that! And probably better than this bunch of muppets.”
The truth is it took the Argentines a while to get the hang of football. With their own clubs now up and running, they invited some of England’s finest over to demonstrate how the game should be played. First off the steamboat in 1904 was Southampton who played five games in Argentina and one in Uruguay, winning them all by the kind of scores the club could only dream about now. And most were in front of crowds of more than 10,000. They beat Combinados de Argentinos 8-0 and Belgrano Athletic 6-1.
A year later Nottingham Forest came with their baggy shorts and slicked-back hair to again give the local chaps a footballing lesson. They beat Belgrano 7-0 and la Liga Argentina 9-1. It’s remarkable, with hindsight, that the Argentines didn’t ditch football at that point in favour of something like water-polo or badminton.
 From the days before lung cancer... Everton and Tottenham both arrived in 1909 and played each other in a couple of exhibition matches, before clocking up some more rugby scores against the best that Argentina and Uruguay had to offer.
But the real turning point came with the visit in 1912 of Swindon Town. A local journalist wrote: “Argentine fans will be able to applaud undoubtedly one of the best teams in the world.” Another said: “The arrival of the famous Swindon Town marks another era in the history of Association Football in the Argentine.”
The Robins won six and drew two in front of crowds of up to 20,000. But the local teams were no longer being embarrassed against “undoubtedly one of the best teams in the world” The stabilizers were off. Argentine football was flying.
English words and phrases such as ‘referee’, ‘corner’, ‘manager’,‘offside’ and ‘that was quite clearly handball you stupid bastard’ are still used in Argentine football. I made that last one up but you get the drift.
The ball was kicked back in the opposite direction after Argentina won the 1978 World Cup with the arrival at Tottenham of Ossie Ardiles and Ricardo Villa — pioneers of a trail followed by Alberto Tarantini, Julio Arca, Fabricio Coloccini, Javier Mascherano, Carlos Tevez and even Nestor Lorenzo, repaying Swindon Town for their early guidance.
Argentinos Juniors appear to have lost the art of winning, having drawn four and lost two of the last six. They took an early lead in this one when Gabriel Hauche was gifted the ball in the visitor’s penalty area. Arsenal then bungled a sackful of chances and the home side were lucky to go in at half-time with the lead. It was reversed in the second half with Argentinos playing the better football but fluffing one opportunity after another and then giving away a late goal.
It’s a case of Argentinos Juniors playing out the last four games of the season from a comfortable but none too inspiring spot in the middle of the table. The race for the title is now between unfashionable but unbeaten Banfield, who are two points clear of Newell’s Old Boys. Neither of the big boys, Boca or River, are in the running.
Colon 2 Argentinos Juniors 0
With this defeat, Argentinos Juniors can say goodbye to any lingering hopes they had of challenging for the title. But it was a sad way to go. A dodgy penalty in the second minute put the visitors on the back foot. An even dodgier one in the second half punched the final nail in the coffin. To rub salt into gangrenous wounds, Argentinos also had two goals disallowed. Then a long journey back to Buenos Aires during which to mull over their poor
fortune.
Colon is a town way up in the north-east of Argentina…a nondescript sort of place which you´d probably never visit unless you had family or friends there — and then, not often.
 Four Legs Good That´s why I found myself in another of Argentina´s nondescript towns, visiting family, which I don´t do often. In this case the in-laws in Chacabuco, deep in that huge, flat, fertile plain in the middle of the country known as the Pampas. The in-laws live on the edge of this nondescript town in the middle of a huge, flat, featureless, fertile plain which lends itself to ample alliteration and many cows. The alliteration is infinite but there are not as many cows as there used to be, the reasons for which I shall explain later.
I´m not sure if you´ve ever attempted to describe a nondescript town but I shall dig deep and give it a try. Chacabuco lies about four hours west of Buenos Aires, as the bus drives. When I say the Pampas are flat, I mean really flat. In the words of that old Who song, you can see for miles and miles and miles. You might see a water tank in the distance and think you´re nearly there. But you´re not. And when you do finally reach your destination, you wonder why you bothered.
We passed through several other towns which looked pretty much the same — Chivilcoy, San Andres, Lujan. I imagine that you could easily get off the bus in the wrong town and not realise your mistake for several hours — or years!! Residents pass their days scratching their bellies and drinking mate, a bitter tea imbibed through a metal straw.
Chacabuco, like all the other towns in the region, has a main plaza that you won´t be surprised to learn is in the middle of the town. In the middle of that, you can bet the price of a Chelsea season ticket, that you´ll find a statue of San Martin, Argentina´s liberator from Spanish colonial rule. Sometimes he´ll be on a horse, sometimes not. So I´m exagerating a little here, there is some variety. Then you´ll find a plaza in each corner of the town. So that´s five plazas in all. If you run out of things to do, you can walk from one to another — and then back again!
There are people who enjoy and thrive in flat places, like Kansas or Saskatchewan or Cambridgeshire but I´m not one of them. I need a hill or two, or a coastline. Does living in a place like Chacabuco make you flat and dull, or do towns like this attract flat and dull people? This is small town with a capital S and a capital T. The residents are often suspicious of all outsiders – whether they´re from Buenos Aires or Basingstoke, so they treat me with no more or less disdain than any other visitor.
I fear I´m being a little harsh. Chacabuco is peaceful, relatively prosperous and a lovely place to bring up children. I also saw a hummingbird, which left me very excited. And that you don´t do in Basingstoke! Also, I have discovered three interesting things about Chacabuco. It´s the hometown of Argentina´s 1978 World Cup winning captain, Daniel Passarella. It produces oats, cows and soya. And it´s got five plazas. Or did I already mention that?
When I first visited Chacabuco some years ago, it had just two restaurants, both pizzerias. One was closed at lunchtime, the other in the evening. But now the town is buzzing, literally. A by-product of its recent genetically-modified soyabean prosperity is that the whole population now travels by moped — flat out on the paved roads, recklessly on the dirt tracks and often with girlfriend, two small children and pet dog riding pillion.
 Soya...Mmmm!!? Monsanto and its GM soya have transformed the Argentine countryside. Cows are not exactly an endangered species. But more and more of them are being herded off the lush green pastures and are now reared in the months before slaughter in tight enclosures on high protein food in a system known as feedlot. It´s nutritious and tasty, at least that´s what its supporters
will tell you, but it´s not grass.
Soya is also nutritious and tasty, at least that´s what its supporters will tell you. But most Argentines would rather nibble Sir Alex´s discarded chewing gum than put soya on their plate.
Most of it goes to Europe and China to feed cattle. There´s surely some irony there but I find that after a few hours in this place – the flatness, the wind and the smell of cow excrement mixed with the chemicals – and I can´t think straight.
What is beyond question is that there´s more and more soya and less and cows, simply because GM soya is easier to grow and much, much more lucrative. You almost never have to call out the vet to deal with tricky illnesses. There are stories here that some producers will buy themselves a new house on the profits of each harvest. And some have traded their mopeds for fancy four x fours. There are more than two restaurants in town now, a wine shop and stores selling designer clothes.
But what of the gauchos, those hardy Argentine cowboys who tamed the savage pampas? With fewer cattle to herd they are becoming little more than showmen who entertain tourists. Or they sit around drinking mate, scratching their bellies and telling tales of the old days.
I also scratched my belly as I watched this game live on television, with the windows open and the crickets making a hell of a racket outside. This was a reasonable performance by Argentinos Juniors against one of the title contenders. But the result, thanks to poor refereeing, left me disappointed and disillusioned.
I think I´ll drown my sorrows with a cocktail made from fermented GM soya tipped over a glass of crushed ice with a cherry on top. It´s the future and it smells foul!
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