Quilmes  2  Argentinos Juniors  2

Football, so they say, is a funny game. Only I’m not laughing. Argentinos Juniors were 1-0 up in the second half when Quilmes had a player sent off. Quilmes started to play better and scored an equaliser. Now that, whichever way you look at it, doesn’t make sense. Then they had another player sent off and, with nine men against eleven, they scored a second.

It’s not supposed to go like that. Argentinos Juniors are the current champions and currently sit at the bottom of the table. Quilmes are only one place above them.

Of course I was relieved when Nicolas Berado bundled the ball into the net for the equaliser in the dying seconds of the game but my innate sense of justice meant that I cheered with a heavy heart.

Quilmes showed greater fight and deserved more. They evoked the spirit of the indigenous people after whom the town of Quilmes is named, rather than the beer by the same name which, as I believe I’ve complained about on many previous occasions, has about as much bite as a pensioner who’s lost his false teeth.

The Quilmes people were a tough bunch, resisting the Inca invasions of the fifteenth century up around what is now the northern province of Tucuman. Then they spent another hundred or so years fighting the Spaniards until they were defeated in 1667.

Food Handout

The Spaniards, because they had guns and horses and the Indians didn’t, decided to relocate the survivors to a reservation just south of Buenos Aires and two thousand or so were marched the 1,500km, hundreds of them dying on the way. The settlement was abandoned in 1810 and the survivors moved to what is now the city of Quilmes – home to the nation’s most popular beer and its second worst first division football team.

A few hundred Quilmes Indians stayed on in Tucuman province and today their descendants cling onto scraps of land where they live in abject poverty, a shadow of their former glory. It’s much the same story for the remainder of Argentina’s other indigenous people.

Julio Roca is a national hero. He must be since his face adorns the Argentine 100 peso note. He was twice president at the end of the nineteenth century, rising to prominence as a talented and brave military officer, responsible for taming the wild interior of Argentina, the pampas. By taming I mean subduing the ferocious Indians. At least that’s what some history books will tell you. Others say he was a ruthless murderer who butchered innocent women and children. Nothing is ever simple, is it?

Whatever the truth, many Argentines are not even aware that they still have an indigenous population. There are quaint stories down in the southern town of Ushuaia about the 1831 British expedition, led by Captain Robert Fitzroy, that took four local Fuegian Indians back to England to ‘civilise’ them. Streets in Ushuaia go by the names they were given –Boat Memory, York Minster, Fuegia Basket y Jemmy Button.

But there were also ferocious battles, brave and colourful chiefs and well-established indigenous communities equal to those in North America. The difference is that there was no Hollywood film industry to record and romanticise them.

The truth is that in the end there wasn’t much to romanticise. There are hardly any Indians left in the far south, for instance. Illness and poverty killed them off many years ago.

There are communities in the north of Argentina, saved by their remoteness from modern society and their poverty. I’ve been there — the Toba in Chaco province, the Wichi in Salta and the Guarani in Misiones.

They are different communities with their own languages and customs but what they have in common is the poverty in which they live and the disdain with which they’re treated by the local authorities.

The Toba in Chaco were dying from malnutrition and tuberculosis – in the twenty-first century in a country that belongs to the G20 group of the world’s wealthiest nations.

Young Guarani were committing suicide because they felt ostracized by modern society. Their elders decided to keep them under quarantine and limit their exposure to the outside world – patrolling the perimeter of their community.

The Toba in Chaco

The Wichi, near the borders with Bolivia and Paraguay, were victims of a battle for souls being fought by North American and European evangelical missions which, in their race to win converts, paid little heed to the indigenous people’s history and culture.

These are all people for whom land is life. Yet land is also power in Argentina and after generations of falling victim to unscrupulous farmers, corrupt politicians and mercenary police forces, the remaining indigenous communities have been pushed into barren scraps of land where most rely on government food handouts and their only comfort is often in drink and drugs.

Yet despite the abject conditions in which they were living, I still encountered a generosity, a peacefulness and a nobility lacking in modern society. I always felt enriched by my visits.

“You’re a naive, soft-in-the-head old hippy,” I hear some of you say. “Romanticising a community that does little to help itself.”  Perhaps. But I can’t help thinking that Argentina needs its original people more than it thinks it does.

That’s what happens when your team is bottom of the table and playing crap football – you end up searching elsewhere for spiritual solace. It’s certainly not going to be found in that insipid Quilmes beer, unlikely to be discovered in the industrial drabness of the Quilmes neighbourhood but maybe, just maybe, it lurks in what remains of those once noble Quilmes people.

Elsewhere in the first division, there were goals galore. Underachieving Racing Club thumped Lanus 4-0. Rubbish Gimnasia claimed their first victory of the season with a 3-0 drubbing of Huracan and San Lorenzo continued their fine start to the season with a 3-1 win over Olimpo.

Boca are beginning to string results together with a 3-1 win over Colon, made all the sweeter for their fans knowing that River had lost 1-0 to Newell’s. Banfield beat Independiente 4-0 and new boys, All Boys, continue to shine with an impressive 2-1 victory over Estudiantes.