When Argentina plunged into a political and economic crisis of unprecedented proportions at the end of 2001, I was finishing my book Fútbol y Patria. The book traced the way soccer had been used as an indispensable tool in the construction of Argentine national narratives in the 20th century. Soccer had assumed this unsuitable role largely because of a weak civil society and the crisis of coherent, modern national narratives. The use of soccer in building a national narrative really took off in the 1960s, but gained particular momentum during the military dictatorship of the 1970s and the coinciding World Cup to which Argentina played host in 1978. The climax of this process came in the mid-1980s with the simultaneous emergence of soccer icon Diego Maradona and the extremist neoliberalism of the Carlos Menem government, which I term neoconservadurisimo. Menem even showed up at the national stadium donning the national team’s soccer jersey shortly after taking office.
Indeed, throughout the 1990s the only unified chorus of a national narrative seemed to be in soccer. Because of the economic joyride it was a chauvinistic and pretentious one, instead of the plebeian, “national-popular” narrative of previous decades. And rather than the politicization of soccer, we witnessed the soccer-ization of politics, relegating discussions of the National to a question of sports and sporting events. The December 2001 crisis and the June 2002 World Cup in South Korea and Japan allowed me to revisit that historical analysis. Something had changed in Argentina and soccer’s role did not escape that transformation. In the end, soccer was properly and decidedly subordinated as a central element of Argentine political life and put in its proper place.
The explosion came on December 19, 2001. I listened as President Fernando De la Rúa addressed the country. He declared a state of siege, an emergency measure limiting constitutional rights of assembly and other civil liberties. I was living in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Congreso, a few blocks from the national parliament building. Although I was on a top floor, I began hearing the cacophonic clank of pots and pans being beaten. I imagined a mobilization of indignant ahorristas—the collective name of mostly middle-class individuals with frozen bank accounts, which rendered their life-savings captive at insolvent banks. Once outside I was immediately swallowed up by thousands of protestors hitting their kitchenware and shouting anti-government chants demanding the resignation of the President and the Minister of Economy Domingo Cavallo. Protestors also clamored against the state of siege, under which the demonstration was illegal: “Qué boludos/el estado de sitio/se lo meten en el culo!” Which loosely translates into, “They’re so stupid/let ’em take the state of siege/and shove it up their ass.”
The cacerolazo was in full force. Every minute, throngs of protestors folded into the mix. Looking up at the broad staircase of Congress loaded with demonstrators, many waving Argentine flags and wearing the national team’s soccer jersey, the resemblance was irrefutable: It was the cheap standing-room-only bleachers of an Argentine soccer stadium; the colors, a sea of white and baby blue; the body language, arms shaking rhythmically along with chants; and even the words of the songs were superimposed on the typical melodies of the stadiums.
Several thousand demonstrators began marching from the Congress towards the Plaza de Mayo, which is flanked on one side by the Casa Rosada, the seat of the executive. On the main avenue protestors began smashing the windows of banks and other multinational enterprises with rocks. I passed by a large group of soccer fans of the team San Lorenzo. A championship game had been cancelled over the unrest, so they told me they were at the protest to “sacarnos la leche,” to vent, or “take it out on” something. Back at the steps of Congress, I stubbornly insisted on mentally evoking the crowd in the stands of a soccer game.
Galvanized by Cavallo’s resignation, the demonstrators came back for more the following day. This time it was no longer just pots and pans. The entire Plaza de Mayo was fenced-off and protected by police who violently stood their ground against the ebb and flow of protestors trying to enter the plaza. In addition to the organized rank and file of unions and political parties, were groups of young people doggedly trying to penetrate the fence of the plaza, the sole object of desire. Clearly, these youths were seasoned veterans of urban combat through their frequent confrontations with police at soccer stadiums and at road blockades with the unemployed workers called piqueteros. They broke sidewalk tiles to accumulate an arsenal of projectiles, exhibiting their remarkable accuracy, and on their faces they wore lemon-doused handkerchiefs to resist the gases. Tear gas finally gave way to bullets; by the end of the day police had killed five people.
Abandoned by both the opposition and his own party, De la Rúa resigned at 5 p.m. and fled the Casa Rosada in a helicopter. The news cooled the climate on the streets, which had the indelible marks of an uprising: looted stores and defaced multinational establishments like a McDonald’s that had been set on fire.
Not only did the Argentine neoliberal experiment discard four presidents in two weeks, it also brought with it an explosive rise in poverty and unemployment. Poverty levels more than doubled to over 50%, nominal unemployment reached 25% with more than 40% real unemployment.[1] The experiment left industry uncompetitive and devastated, the working-class sentenced to unemployment or underemployment in the informal sector, an economy concentrated in foreign hands, and privatized public services owned by multinational conglomerates. And seduced by a false modernity, the upper- and middle-classes who had travelled the world and surrendered to the most opulent brand of consumerism thanks to the monetary overvaluation were now left at the doorstep of their farcical reality. Sadly, the events of December had also left 25 dead.
My book discussed the centrality of soccer as a narrative of the tribal identity of Argentine contemporaneity, but at the same time analyzed its weakness in articulating a successful narrative of national identity capable of producing new social practices. With the withdrawal of the state, which had historically been the undisputed arbiter of Argentina’s national narrative, the task was left to two distinct actors. The first is the mass media, an institution that produces stories with the intent of maximizing profits; thus, a producer of consumers, but not citizens. The other actor is civil society, which was severely weakened under the military dictatorship of 1976–1983 and by the failure of the subsequent Radical Civic Union government to bring those responsible for the dictatorship to justice during the democratic transition. This weakness was exacerbated by the shift of Peronist populism to a conservative revolution in 1989 with the swearing-in of Carlos Menem, initiating the neoliberal onslaught.
December’s events had resuscitated national symbols, among them the flag and Argentine soccer jerseys. But perhaps more important was that practices learned at soccer stadiums—the spontaneous creation of chants and the tactics of resistance against police repression—became purely political when crossbred with popular mobilization. In that displacement—soccer practices being adopted and placed in new contexts to produce new meanings—appeared the only possibilities for a weakened and peripheral civil society to construct new narratives of national identity. Similarly, soccer had served as a national narrative par excellence during the neoliberal context of dissolved political spaces, the individual reclusion of citizens, the withdrawal of the state and a debilitated civil society.
Identity, however, is not just a narrative, it is also a lived experience, one of struggle and conflict. During the crisis, the “globalized” conditions of Argentine society were perceived as economic, that is, material. The fact that attacks were directed specifically at banks and at the companies of privatized services underlines that globalization was being interpreted as concentrated wealth and as the loss of political autonomy, and not as an illusory access to global symbolic goods. Advertisers kept this “new” Argentine interpretation of globalization at the heart of their marketing strategies in the run-up to the 2002 World Cup. The perceived national narrative by advertisers preyed on nationalism and patriotism, but ironically, also implicitly echoed Argentines’ anti-neoliberal sensibilities.
Despite severe cutbacks in consumption, corporate investments for the World Cup were significant. The satellite cable company Direct TV paid $400 million for transmission rights to Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela. Coca-Cola invested $2.5 million in marketing and publicity. McDonald’s, Gillette and MasterCard were also big advertisers. The official sponsors of the Argentine national team included the French supermarket chain Carrefour, Coca-Cola, Visa, Adidas, the beer company Quilmes, and the oil and gas company Repsol-YPF.
The list is suggestive. Every sponsor was a multinational corporation, but Quilmes and Repsol-YPF stand out. Quilmes, traditionally an Argentine company, was sold to the Brazilian beer company Brahma just days before the start of the tournament. This allowed Quilmes’ main competitor Isenbeck to launch an aggressive ad campaign that questioned the legitimacy of Quilmes as a supposed “defender” of Argentine soccer patriotism. One biting Isenbeck ad showed the blue and white Quilmes bottle cap superimposed on the central sphere of the Brazilian flag. The ad said, “The Brazilians bought Quilmes. Just days before the World Cup? How do you say ‘sold out’ in Portuguese?” In closing, the ad proclaimed, “Isenbeck. We sell beer. And nothing else.”
The case of Repsol-YPF is particularly telling. Since the 1950s, YPF had been the shining star of Argentina’s state-owned companies, and on top of being a regulatory instrument for state control of gas prices, it was also considered a symbol of Argentine self-sufficiency. Under Menem, its privatization was wrought with turbulence and corruption. The subsequent mass lay-offs and rise in prices sparked some of the most severe social crises under Menemismo. It is from the disintegrated communities that relied on employment with YPF that the piqueteros emerged. To this day, memory of the employment role of the state company remains strong and continues to define politics in the many affected communities. Repsol, Spain’s privatized state oil company, acquired YPF in 1999. Despite its status as a symbol of the displacement of national industry by foreign capital, Repsol-YPF mounted a huge publicity campaign during the World Cup that announced, “When the national team plays, we all play. YPF, more than just a sponsor, is an official fan of the Argentine national team.” “Repsol,” the tainted half of the official company name, was conspicuously absent.
All the companies steered their advertising efforts with the commonplace triumphal nationalist narrative regarding soccer, but in ads for this World Cup it was impossible to disregard the 2001 crisis. A Repsol-YPF character in one ad pleaded for a goal in order to have “at least something to be happy about;” Coca-Cola’s slogan ridiculously suggested, “For us to hug each other again;” another company explained, “They can tell you that everything is bad, that the future is in some other place. We prefer to keep our jerseys on. We’re Argentines, and we are not just playing for the trophy, we play for the country.” Quilmes was particularly relentless with its catchy jingle: “Let’s keep on yelling, keep on believing/Let’s not lose heart, in the end we’ll be winning/It’s our flag that we are defending/Let’s show the world that together we’ll do it.”
All these ads allude to a crack, a rupture in the consumptive calm of peripheral capitalism. Something had happened to the country, but “market operators” reverted to magical invocations, to the possibility that the old tepid discourse—the ancient heroic story of the country victorious in soccer’s field of play—could narrate the sense of nationhood dimmed by the demands of the International Monetary Fund and Washington.
According to the discourse of the multinationals, the concept of belonging to the nation is not defined by participation in institutions or decision-making, nor in acquiring certain rights or civic duties. Instead, it depends on the private consumption of the market’s merchandise. “Belonging” and “Argentineness” depend on individual acts of consumption, where each “makes a citizen” of themselves.[2] The corporate ads also perpetuated the wish that a triumphant team would weld the political, social and economic rifts of Argentine society, for their own economic self-interest of course. But Argentines knew better. Citizenship and identity are not won through consumption, a lesson they had learned the hard way through their own experience of widespread exclusion and impoverishment.
The mass media became a recurrent target in January protests, indicating that the general public was also distancing itself from journalistic discourses. The stories told by the mass media seemed just another product, a mere vicarious tale. Nonetheless, the projection of the Argentine soccer team as a favorite to win the 2002 World Cup incited a media-driven frenzy of inflated expectations eagerly consumed by the public. The tournament arrived in the context of heightened attention to the sharp social disparities and fragmentation brought to light by the crisis. With this appeared two divergent discourses. On the one hand, soccer was seen as a way out of the problems and as a chance for a definitive social reconciliation. And on the other, the forecast maintained that a World Cup failure would unleash a new societal crash.
The surveys were overwhelming: Argentina will win the championship. A representative article published by the daily Página 12 on the day of Argentina’s first game in the tournament cited a survey revealing that 65% of Argentines believed the country had a “very good” chance of winning the World Cup. Countries that respondents said they did not want to win the tournament were telling: England, 33%; Brazil, 21%; and the United States, 12%.
The placement of England at the top of the survey confirmed that the English rivalry trumps all others in the worldview of Argentine soccer. Brazil’s inclusion alludes to a longstanding local rivalry. But the third was more surprising, because there was virtually no chance that the United States would win the World Cup. The most obvious interpretation is political: Argentine sports desires were driven by anti-imperialist tendencies. What’s more, 17% of those interviewed preferred Brazil as an alternative victor if Argentina were eliminated and 14% Uruguay, disclosing a sense of solidarity in which continental ties superseded local rivalries.
In the same article, the journalist reminded the reader that 80% of Argentines believed the political, economic and social situation would get worse and 70% qualified President Eduardo Duhalde’s performance as “bad or very bad.” The resounding expectations in the realm of soccer coincided with an imminent apocalypse regarding everything else. Still, a success in soccer implied a magical solution to the political crisis. A victory would mean the suspension—if not the outright elimination—of the conflict or at the very least, a grace period for the government. Not surprisingly, this hypothesis was always attributed to others; no one would ever accept that interpretation as their own.
However, the same article contained what I call the revolutionary counter-prophecy. The article described how at a meeting between provincial governors and the President, the governor of Santa Fe province, Carlos Reutemann, told Duhalde: “We have to fix the corralito problem, because if we get eliminated from the World Cup and we haven’t solved the problem of the corralito, there is no telling what will happen to the country.” In sum, the counter-prophecy predicted that a poor showing at the tournament would result in a definitive social explosion. In the event of elimination, so it went, the almighty power of soccer would lead the combined forces of indignant ahorristas and enraged piqueteros to social revolution and culminate in the lynching of the political class in the Plaza de Mayo.
Alas, the absolute failure of Argentina at the World Cup—eliminated in the first round with only two converted goals, a tie and a loss, to England no less—prevented debunking the first prophecy empirically. The failure did, however, prove the foreseeable fiction of the latter. Why had there been so many useless prophetic statements? Basically, the explanation lies in the never proven, but often accepted, premise that links soccer and politics in a relationship of cause and effect. More recently, for instance, the Brazilian daily Folha de São Paulo suspected that Mauricio Macri, president of the successful Boca Juniors soccer club, reached the second round in the 2003 Buenos Aires mayoral election because of his team’s victory at a regional tournament the same year. Naturally, Macri was later defeated because of political reasons rather than any related to soccer.
Without a doubt, the political, economic and social climate allowed the staging of absurdly inflated expectations. A sports success would have surely been well received by a population hit hard by devaluation, inflation, unemployment, hunger, poverty, the collapse of First World illusions and betrayal by the political class—the seven plagues of the neoliberal inheritance—but the end of Argentina’s World Cup aspirations confirmed the disconnect between sports and politics.
Not long after the World Cup, the middle classes seemingly recovered from their original indignation and cautiously withdrew from public protests, a far cry from their previous street militancy. “Que se vayan todos” (throw them all out)—the all-encompassing tag-line that emerged from the December 2001 protests in repudiation of the entire political class—had shyly retreated to an electoral renewal where the “old Peronism” succeeded by taking up its traditional populist, social-democrat banner.
On balance, however, the 2001 protests cannot be interpreted in such a pessimistic way. Besides a sharp increase in work for my colleagues in the social sciences who frantically dedicated themselves to analyzing events, the crisis produced a healthy re-politicization of the public sphere; a growth in progressive discourses exemplified by the recent nullification of amnesty laws regarding the Dirty War; and a change in expectations—generally speaking, the population is much more optimistic today.
After the climax of politicization reached during the crisis, the waters have calmed down for now. It is highly unlikely today that the national soccer team would appear with jerseys defending the state-owned Aerolíneas Argentinas and its workers, nor would the team demand better wages for teachers, as they did in 2001 at qualifying games for the World Cup.
The “contamination” of soccer with politics and politics with soccer reappeared briefly but prominently with the invasion of Iraq. Demands for peace were made in some stadiums where large flags appeared vindicating Saddam—again, a clear snub at U.S. imperialism. But an instance of this last example also shows that tribalism has apparently returned. At the start of the war, fans of Colón, a team from the city of Santa Fe, displayed a huge banner during a game against Unión, a rival from the same city, that said, “Hey Bush, there’s oil in Unión’s soccer field”—the message being that Bush would be provoked to bomb the field of their adversary. Then, after a deadly and disastrous flood in Santa Fe, which took a particularly heavy toll on and around Colón’s stadium, the Unión fans’ banner mercilessly replied: “In Colón’s soccer field…there’s water.”
In July 2003 Argentines celebrated the 25th anniversary of the country’s championship victory in the 1978 World Cup, held at the height of the oppressive military dictatorship. Most journalists, recalling the dictatorship’s influence even on sports, downplayed the World Cup success. Some of the players participating in the ceremony—particularly Julio Ricardo Villa who played in that World Cup and Claudio Morresi, the brother of a desaparecido—wanted soccer to acknowledge the national context in which the Cup was won. The ceremony tried to incorporate and pay homage to the human rights groups, but the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were not allowed to participate—a glaring omission no one wanted to take responsibility for. No one, not the soccer establishment, nor the fans in the stands were willing to validate such political recognition.
The crisis and its consequences restored things to their rightful place: Politics are once again just politics and soccer only soccer. Despite the wishes and the attempts of prominent sports figures and the mediocre interpretations of the media, the crisis—one of strictly economic and political dimensions unrelated to sports—permitted Argentina to recuperate some of the long forgotten characteristics of a modern society. Argentina now discusses its problems in appropriate places: in congress or in popular mobilizations, and not in soccer stadiums or in the sports press. Today, Argentina is a society that more than ever before understands that citizenship and national identity are not determined by soccer victories or in the consumption of goods, whether a soft drink or an Argentine soccer jersey.
About the Author
Pablo Alabarces is a professor of popular culture at the School of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires and at the Center for Argentine Studies (IFCH-UNICAMP, Brazil). He is the author of Fútbol y Patria and several other books on sports, soccer and society.
1. L. Cicalese, M. E. Curto, B. Presman, Fútbol, identidad nacional y hegemonía en una Argentina global. Mundial Corea-Japón 2002, (Buenos Aires: mimeo, 2002).
2. L. Cicalese, et. al., Fútbol, identidad nacional y hegemonía en una Argentina global. Mundial Corea-Japón 2002. Also see N. García Canclini, Consumidores y ciudadanos. Conflictos multiculturales de la globalización, (México: Grijalbo, 1994).
