Soccer, Suitcase Scandals and Insomnia, January 2008

It’s official. I can leave Argentina someday, because I finally saw Diego Maradonna in the flesh. He and a younger male friend walked right in front of my car while I waited at a stop light at a traffic circle near the forests of Palermo, where I live. I was returning from dropping my three-year old son at his camp, lamenting how absolutely crappy I feel following a week of end-of-pregnancy insomnia, worrying about the pains of labor, wondering when I will ever sleep through the night again, and there he was, just 10 feet away. I know it was him, because as soon as I recognized him, cars to my right and left started honking and waving, and he glanced their way, put his hand above his eyes to avoid wincing into the sun, gave a half-hearted wave, turned and kept on lumbering across the street.

Maradonna is one of Argentina’s most famous and controversial personalities. Like Brazil’s Pele, he came from an extremely humble family and rose to stardom through his awesome skills as a soccer player. His most infamous act was his participation in the 1986 World Cup hosted by Mexico, when Argentina beat England in a quarter-final match. In a controversial episode, he was not penalized for a handball near the England team’s goal. The ball found the back of England’s net and five minutes later Maradonna scored another goal (dubbed the goal of the century after he beat 5 English players and the goalie). Argentina won the game, and Maradonna’s “Mano de Dios” (the hand of God) became legend.

For a soccer fan in Argentina, seeing Maradonna is like being a devout Catholic and catching a glimpse of the Pope saying mass at St. Peters, or being a fan of E! Entertainment Television and spotting George Clooney at a restaurant. Of course, George is a might easier on the eyes. And I don’t really care one way or another for Maradonna personally – I just think seeing him is a rite of passage for expatriates in Argentina.

The years haven’t been kind to Maradonna. His many attempts at alcohol and drug rehab haven’t helped his physique. It’s actually somewhat of a feat that he can still walk around the city in the muggy, 90 degree F heat. I’m also surprised he’s still in town, with half the city gone to the beaches for the summer season. But there he was, getting in his morning walk, pot-bellied, wearing a big silver watch and his signature curly, too-long, greasy mullet, in all his sweaty glory.

Now all I have to do as a soccer fan in Argentina is see a few games here (especially one at the famed “Bombonera”, the bon-bon shaped stadium of the working-class-supported Boca Juniors team that Maradonna played on in his glory days), and also score tickets to a “superclasico”—the match between the firecest soccer rivalry in Buenos Aires; Boca Juniors vs. River Plate.

My husband was lucky enough to be invited to the last superclasico through some Central Bank contacts here (there are some perks to government work!). I was crushed to not be invited too, but I’ve accepted the fact that people in Latin America just don’t understand how a woman could actually love playing and watching soccer. They just don’t believe it. “No really, I’m a soccer player! I used to play all the time!.” “Seguro…” the men reply (sure). He said the match was one of the loudest and most interesting sports events he has ever attended. Half way through the game, sulking and resentful for having been left behind to play mommy while he watched sports, I received a text message from him on his cell phone. “River Plate los putos que son” (translation: River Plate, what--insert homophobic insult here--they are). I didn’t get it. He hasn’t declared himself an “hincha”, or a fan of any one team yet, a requirement among all males in Argentina. And he is not one for sending me homophobic insults via text message. It wasn’t until he got home later that he explained that message was the was the deafening chant of the Boca fans he listened to each time the rival River team took the field. The chanting was so loud, the bombonera stadium shook. In Argentina, you can take your kids with you to a soccer game for free if they are under 10 years old and they can sit on your lap. My husband sat in awe as he watched fathers and sons screaming “Putos!” together at the River team. I’m reminded of a saccharine TV commercial my father-in-law jokingly loves to quote in jest; “Family. Isn’t it about time?”

With that kind of social engineering, its no wonder that soccer matches in Argentina, like in many places with teams that play at the world class level, often become violent events. More than a few deaths have occurred here pre, during, and post game between the “Barra Brava”, or the most fanatical fans of the game. Last season, a few of Argentina’s premiere league games had to be called in the middle of the match to be continued at a later date and without crowds, due to excessive violence among fans. The police say they are powerless to control the fans, and blame the clubs for fomenting violence. The football clubs say that crowd control is a security issue and the police’s job. It’s just another example of how masterful Argentines are of assigning blame elsewhere for their own sins.

Not a lot has changed in terms of the role of women in soccer in Latin America since I played as the only woman on the U.S. Embassy soccer team in El Salvador back in 1994. Here, even today, if you want to play soccer at a competitive level as a woman, you often end up playing with men. Soccer just hasn’t been promoted as a serious sport for women in Latin America, not even in sports-crazy Argentina. Last year, before I knew I was pregnant, a man who organizes a women’s soccer team at the U.S. Embassy here recruited me to play on a team of foreign women. We were scheduled to play in a friendly match against the women’s contingent of the Argentina professional soccer team Racing. We had never played together before, and during our pre-game practice, I realized we were a pretty motley crew of over 30 year old women (and some, like me, closer to 40! Gulp) of French, American, Mexican-American, Canadian and Argentine extraction. Our Argentine players had just started playing soccer a few weeks before. We were immediately intimidated when our competitors took the field doing their synchronized warm-up exercises, and chanting their team warm up song. They also had beautifully matching Racing jerseys on, manicured nails, nice hair and young and shapely bodies (this is Argentina after all). I think the average age of their players was around 22. “Oh man. Not only do they look better, we’re gonna to get slaughtered!”, my teammates and I mumbled depressingly to each other. “Don’t worry about it. Just play and consider it practice!”, our soccer coach exclaimed. Thank God looks can be deceiving. Yes, the team would have beaten us in a beauty contest, but they had a thing or two to learn about the game. They were younger so they ran circles around us, but they couldn’t pass the ball, they couldn’t control the ball, and mostly, they couldn’t score to save their lives. I lost count after we were up by about 5 goals. So, Argentina has a ways to come before their women dominate on the soccer field. I’m looking forward to playing again after my pregnancy, and seeing whether anything changes in the world of women’s soccer locally in the year and ½ I’ll have been out of commission.

Given recent events, my husband is probably lucky he saw the superclasico when he did. Relations between the U.S. and Argentina have reached a new low in the wake of yet another political scandal that unfolded just days after the new President of Argentina, Cristina Fernandez, took power. You can read all about the “valija-gate” (suitcase-gate) scandal in the January 3, 2008 print edition of The Economist, titled “Slush and Garbage”. I won’t bother telling the story for fear of being declared “persona non grata” by the Argentine government for writing about it. The best I can do is ask you to imagine you are writing a college entrance essay and you have to incorporate all of the following words and phrases into a 2,000 word story.

$800,000 dollars in a suitcase
A private jet chartered by an Argentine state energy company from Caracas
An overly-eager customs agent
A fleeing suitcase carrier
A Presidential election in Argentina
The Presidents of Argentina, Venezuela and the U.S. government
Venezuela’s petro-dollars
U.S. courts
Collaboration with the FBI
Alleged threats and bribes for the suitcase carrier from 5 Venezuelans
Accusations of meddling in another country’s internal affairs

Add a healthy dose of defensiveness, a dash of anti-Americanism, and a tablespoon of mistrust and well, that will bring you pretty much up to speed on where things stand diplomatically between the governments of the U.S., Argentina and Venezuela these days.

In other news, my son turned 3 and I’m about to give birth to a new baby girl. I’m at the bitter end of what has been a looooong pregnancy. Suffice it to say that being pregnant at 39 is not the same thing as being pregnant at 35. Ecstatic to be free of the incredulously-large bowling ball sized lump in my belly (“are you sure you are not having twins?”), I’m also scared about the local birth experience and the lack of sleep I have in front of me. With the end in sight, my husband and I are relishing the exclusive time we have with each other and our son, feeling sorry that his life will never be the same again starting in just a few weeks. We are also philosophizing a lot about families, having two kids instead of one, and whether we will be able to love the second as much as the first. My husband was lamenting the other day how one needs to become a parent to truly understand that kids will never understand, or be able to fully reciprocate, the love that parents feel for them. “That’s biology,” my physician brother explained during a recent visit. But I think I like the joke I heard from my taxi driver the other day better as an explanation. Here it is in Spanish and in English:

“Un hombre tiene una mujer que no se lleva bien con la suegra. La suegra convence a su marido matar a su madre. El pibe lo hace, pero la esposa dice que tiene que sacar el corazon de la madre y enterrarlo para terminar bien con la madre. El senor corta el corazon del pecho de su madre con un cuchillo de gaucho y comienza a correr para buscar un sitio para enterrarlo. Se tropieza, y el Corazon se cae al suelo y comienza a dar vueltas. El Corazon se levanta, crece una boca y dice al senor, “Hijo! Te lastimaste?”

“A man has a wife who doesn’t get along with her mother-in-law. She convinces her husband to kill his mother. The man does it, but the wife tells him he has to cut out her mother’s heart and bury it in order to finish off the mother-in-law for good. The man cuts out his mother’s heart with a gaucho’s knife and starts to run to find a place to bury it. He trips, the heart falls from his hands and rolls on the ground. The heart gets up, grows a mouth and says to the man, “Son! Did you hurt yourself?”

I’m continuously struck by how life, and even relationships between countries can change in a split second, purely due to chance. Had I not been so late dragging myself out of bed the other day to take my son to camp, I might not have seen Diego Maradonna on the street. But seeing him woke me up, and gave me a level of creative energy I haven’t felt in weeks. I’m awake and haven’t yawned once while writing this. And similarly, had the customs agent at the airport here felt just a tad less inspired to do his job that fateful day back in August, Argentina and the U.S. wouldn’t be in this political mess right now. $800,000 would be sitting in someone’s bank account now or under a mattress, and no one would have been the wiser. It would be business as usual in Latin American politics. So maybe we won’t get to the superclasico this year after all. But that’s life in Latin America. It can turn on a dime. Ain’t it grand?