2023-06-19 18:00:13
Buenos Aires$100,000 is the sanction of Conmebol (the South American Champions) to the Racing de Avellaneda club in Buenos Aires after part of its fans made racist gestures imitating a monkey to the Afro-descendant players of the Flamengo club in Rio de Janeiro, last May 4 at the Presidente Perón stadium, in the southern part of the Argentine capital. The sanction was resolved on the same night that the Colombian footballer Hugo Rodallega, of Independiente de Santa Fe de Bogotá, denounced on television racist insults in La Plata, a neighboring city of the Argentine capital, in a match against the local team Gymnastics and Fencing. “We do not improve as humanity. It is a disaster that is happening all over the world. The issue of racism is tiring,” he said in front of the cameras, between tears, in the mixed area.
“In Argentinian culture there is a kind of mandate that involves attacking or undermining the sports opponent”, Greta Pena, lawyer and member of the Observatory of Discrimination in Sport, explains to the ARA. “This is embodied in prejudices and stereotypes, making racist insults common, but also in relation to sexual orientation, gender identity and sexual domination”. The Observatory, a multidisciplinary public organization that depends on the National Institute against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism, receives complaints, collects data and prepares annual reports on the situation of discrimination in sport in the country. The entity works together with the Argentine Football Association (AFA) in accompanying and advising sports clubs to address the issue within the institution. They form and train management bodies, authorities and players, in big and small clubs, “without distinction”. According to Pena, “the most important thing is prevention”.
In this sense, the expert highlights the social function of sports clubs in Argentina, especially in the most impoverished sectors. It is an important socializing space for boys and girls and “it is where we have to work the most, because then this impacts the school environment and the bullying“. In January, eight rugby players aged between 21 and 23 were sentenced to life in prison for the beating death of Fernando Báez Sosa, three years ago, outside a nightclub to shouts of “black shit”. The boy was 18 years old and the son of Paraguayan immigrants settled in Argentina. “It is an extreme fact, but these chants and folklore in the stadiums that those who try to relativize it talk about penetrate our culture and leave the stadiums to become physical attacks and obstruction of rights”.
The lawyer points out that the penalty should not only be monetary and assumed by the club: “It is not effective. It’s fine that it exists, but the club should be forced to launch an investigation into their fans so it doesn’t happen again. They know perfectly well who are the ones who start the chants”. After decades of incidents of the bravas bars – the extreme sectors of the fans – and the murder at the hands of the police of a fan in 2013, the AFA and the government banned the attendance of the visiting public in the stadiums. Over the years, the rule has varied according to the professional category and has been the subject of public debate, even occupying space in electoral debates. “There is much less violence than before; however, I wouldn’t recommend walking around the Boca neighborhood with a River Plate shirt at two in the morning, nor with a Boca Juniors shirt for Belgrano,” admits Pena.
But he insists on not holding the fans of the teams directly responsible, recipients of hate speeches that proliferate at high speed through the media and social networks: “Football is not an isolated space: if there are political leaders or journalists , who have the most power of dissemination, with racist speeches that even include in their electoral proposals, what can we demand of the people who go to the countryside to let off steam from their daily lives, where they are also discriminated against or labor exploited?”
The Observatory values very positively the example of some players who have already renounced the extra-sport culture of subduing the rival: “They often receive insults from their own stands when they hug or shake hands with the opposing team”. In a country where the love for football is the absolute majority and where this sport is an inseparable element of the culture, Greta Pena insists on using the loudspeaker that the fact of being world champions gives them to counter hate speeches: “Football unites and our differences unite us”. And he concludes: “Sport is a human right and it must be one of the most inclusive activities we have.”
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