ARTS-ENTERTAINMENT – 5.

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Maria Isabel Garcia

BOGOTA, Jul 21 1998 (IPS) - A collection of essays sprinkled with history, nostalgia and longings comprise “Fair Play” a novel approach to peace which is discussed through football.

The book’s editor, Marisol Cano, describes it as “an interesting approximation to what respect for difference means…and an example of what the individual and collective bid for the construction of a country could represent for Colombians.”

Like the national soccer team – which made it to the recent World Cup tournament in France for the third time in a row, but was eliminated during the first round – the authors of “Fair Play” reflect on the marked cultural and racial differences that exist in Colombia.

In the book published by the New Millenium Cultural Corporation, essays by local artists, scientists, philosophers, politicians and coaches alternate with photographs of footballers, from the light-skinned peroxide-haired, Carlos “El Pibe” Valderrama, to the agile black forward Faustino “El Tino” Asprilla.

With more license than what a coach can be permitted – even the manager of the Colombian Hernan Dario Gomez, who admitted that he put up with liquor and other excesses while the team was in training – Cano included some authors who confessed that they did not even like football.

“This spectacle does not seduce me,” wrote Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazabal, author of “Condors Do Not Bury Everyday”, a novel set in the middle of this century, in the period known as “The Violence” when an undeclared civil war between the partisans of the two traditional parties, the liberal and conservatives, left 300,000 dead.

Alvarez Gardeazabal also is governor of the southwestern department of the Valle del Cauca and promoted negotiations between insurgents and authorities in his region, prior to this month’s meeting in Germany between the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerillas and representatives of civil society.

The writer and politician makes it clear that he does not like football. “I cannot avoid recalling that while the ‘Condor’ (a cruel, fearsome Conservative leader) imposed his law in the Valle del Cauca, over the radiowaves…we heard the endless praise of the ‘Blond Dart’,” Argentine footballer Alfredo Di Stefano.

He symbolised Colombia’s golden era of football, when upscale clubs in Bogota signed up players like di Stefano from Southern Cone countries to give a boost to the local game.

Another contributor to the collection of essays, filmmaker Lisandro Duque, sees in the national team a portrait of the country. He points out that while there are brilliant individual players and regional representativity, “like all Colombians, they can’t stand each other” and, because “we are multicultural, but haven’t learned to be pluri-cultural,” the result is an “uneven, fainthearted and timid” game.

That is also influenced by “radio and television rhetoric stubbornly determined that the goal justifies the means and that the result is more important than the show,” which “enters into combustion with complex and perverse cultural factors.

“To me, it doesn’t seem accidental that Colombia only has produced major champions in individual sports – boxing, track and cycle racing,” said Duque, whose films include “The Beetle”, a movie on an anti-hero cyclist.

Fair Play attempts put forward diverse views on the country and to seek solutions to the political and military conflict and the problems of daily life afflicting people in a country in the grips of armed conflict for decades. It even includes a contriobution from the commander of the armed forces, General Manuel Bonnett.

The military leader declared that, in the current circumstances where football and peace both have imbued the people with hopes and dreams, teamwork is needed.

“The idea is to imagine a packed stadium designed for 37 million people, who will not be spectators but active members of the game. All Colombians will play – facing the agents and factors that generate violence,” he wrote.

Among those factors were “corruption, impunity, poverty, social injustice, subversive groups and drug traffickers,” which he says will try to impose their traditional game full of fouls and dirty tricks.

But “with our pressure, we will immobilise them, and that way the goals will be scored one after another until the final victory is achieved,” he concluded.

Presidential peace adviser Daniel Garcia-Pena said that, in Colombia, a sense of nationality is still being formed and “although it seems superficial and fleeting,” the national team is one of the few realities that generates a sense of broadly shared belonging.

“What better illustration of racial and regional diversity than a photo of the national team, which clearly is more similar physically to your average Colombian than, for example, the cabinet of ministers or any board of directors,” he added.

For geneticist Emilio Yunis, football as a practice and phenomenon in Latin America is linked to the transition of cities towards modernity, a process which in Colombia has come later than in the Southern Cone.

“With an abandoned, traditional and backwards countryside, with respect to the city, migration was a necessary response, first of all in the face of the disparities and access to opportunities, and later in reponse to harassment and violence,” he remarks.

In that new urban setting, with broad marginalised and excluded sectors, football appears as a vindication, Yunis said. “It is as if we said: we do not possess the means of production, we do not possess the technique, but we do have our bodies.”

In Colombia, football only began to take on a national style in the 1980s, a phenomenon which concided with the appearance of coach Francisco Maturana, a dentist by profession.

Maturana himself writes in the collection of essays that the key to that process, tardy with respect to countries of the Southern Cone, was “that we began to try to do it our way.”

For that reason, “they will tell the story that in a far-away country called Colombia, where everyone was dead: some from lead and others…from fear, football and basically the national team was our letter of introduction.”