politics is ever-present in Argentinian football – a point re-emphasized recently when Alejandro Sabella, coach of the national team at the Brazil World Cup, declared himself a revolutionary in the tradition of populist former president Juan Perón, lambasting the rich and urging a redistribution of wealth to offset social inequalities. Although Argentina is by comparison better off than most other South American nations, thanks to its large and well-educated middle class, inequality between the land-owning oligarchs and the impoverished working class still fuels political sentiment in the country. Some 25 percent of Argentinas population lives in poverty today, according to the latest statistics. Its the most humble and poorest people who give of themselves most sincerely and who are able to open their hearts to give even what they dont have, said Sabella. Rich people often give only their leftovers, but its the ones who have the least who give even what they lack, and thats a very big difference. Sabella, who is 59, comes from an upper middle class background, growing up in the well-off Barrio Norte neighborhood of Argentinas capital, Buenos Aires. He studied law for a short time before concentrating full-time on a career in football. In his spare time, he tends to settle down for an evening of television political chat shows or documentaries on history. And he makes sure that Argentines know not only his politics, but his history. In 1973-74, when young left-wing revolutionaries confronted – sometimes violently – the authorities, Sabella recalled in a recent interview in the Argentine press how in his room he had a poster of Argentinas then democratically elected president Juan Perón, a populist who championed the rights of the poor, and a collection of issues of the magazine El Descamisado (The Shirtless One), a publication of the revolutionary Montoneros, a socialist guerrilla group that sought to lead a Guevara-inspired revolution in Argentina. I felt a growing need to be always on the side of solidarity and of the distribution of wealth for a fairer, more egalitarian society, in which we can all have equal opportunities,” said Sabella. But like many other young idealists of the time, Sabellas political dreams were dashed by the death of Perón in 1974 and the coup in 1976 by General Videla that ended Peronist rule and kidnapped thousands of young idealists such as Sabella, making them disappear in the dark abyss of the regimes military dungeons. Four decades later, Sabella holds on to the political outlook of his youth. The state needs to be present to regulate politics and mark the path, he said. We cant wait for the trickle-down effect to overflow, because that is a lie. Speaking to an alternative media outlet called La Garganta Poderosa (Powerful Throat) published by journalists from the large shanty towns of Buenos Aires, Sabella recalled how in his youth he worked to aid the urban poor, despite the risk of death at the hands of a military dictatorship that had considered such activities subversive. We went on Saturdays to different poor neighborhoods and worked digging ditches for walls, sharing activities with the Peronist Youth and the rest of the popular movements, Sabella recalled. Argentinas coach does not reserve his political views solely to Argentinas past, however. In his recent interview with La Garganta Poderosa he posed before a chalkboard with a Dream Team made up not of football players, but activists who have been killed or have gone missing since the return of democracy in 1983, many of them young victims of police violence. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Sabella
Posted on: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 19:04:30 +0000
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