by Richard M. Balzano
What happens when a pariah state hosts a global spectacle? That question is more than academic as the United States hosts the FIFA World Cup while waging illegal interventions abroad and brown shirt dirty wars at home, complete with shady detainment facilities and on the cusp of Palantir-induced dystopia to boot. Governments have long understood the public-relations value of international sporting events, using them to project national greatness and rehabilitate tarnished reputations. Argentina’s military dictatorship hoped the 1978 World Cup would do exactly that. As Jorge Rafael Videla’s regime kidnapped, tortured, and murdered thousands of its own citizens in another Latin American torture carnival brought to you by toxic Latin American Cold War anticommunism, the School of the Americas, USAID, and Washington’s long-running habit of mistaking death squads for democracy, the junta hoped a month of soccer would showcase a modern, orderly, and united nation. Instead, the tournament helped expose one of the twentieth century’s worst rights-abusing regimes.
Argentina’s military junta (1976-1983) imposed one of the most repressive states in the hemisphere. Military leaders openly framed their campaign as a civilizing crusade; Videla vowed to save “Western civilization and Christianity” by cleansing Argentina of subversives and their sympathizers, while General Luciano Benjamín Menéndez chillingly predicted: “We are going to have to kill 50,000 people: 25,000 subversives, 20,000 sympathizers, and we will make 5,000 mistakes.” What followed was a campaign of state terror that gave even the Guatemalan counterinsurgency state stiff competition for the title of the hemisphere’s worst human rights abusers. Thousands were kidnapped and disappeared into clandestine detention centers as part of South America’s intelligence sharing torture network known as Operation Condor. At the notorious Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA) in Buenos Aires, one of many torture sites, roughly 5,000 prisoners passed through its doors; only about 150 survived. Victims were beaten, raped, waterboarded, and tortured with electric shocks, often applied to their genitals. Some detainees were told their loved ones were being tortured in nearby rooms and would be killed if they refused to cooperate, while others were forced to watch their spouses and children beaten in front of them. About 500 pregnant detainees were kept alive until they gave birth, their babies then stolen and placed with military families while the mothers disappeared, often sedated, loaded onto aircraft with other prisoners, and thrown into the Atlantic Ocean or River Plate in the regime’s infamous “death flights.” Human rights organizations estimate that as many as 30,000 people were killed or disappeared during Argentina’s Dirty War.
By 1978, Argentina’s international image was deteriorating. Reports of torture, disappearances, and political murder had drawn growing condemnation abroad, while President Jimmy Carter’s administration had suspended military assistance and increasingly made human rights a central issue in U.S.-Argentine relations. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo marched weekly in Buenos Aires demanding answers about their missing children. The world started to notice.
The World Cup appeared to offer a solution. Convinced partly by American anticommunist networks that mass murder was an optics problem and not an humanitarian one, the junta hired American public-relations firm Burson-Marsteller on a million-dollar retainer to craft Argentina’s “new image,” with the World Cup serving as the centerpiece of the campaign. For one month, Argentina would become the center of the sporting universe, with packed stadiums, patriotic pageantry, favorable headlines, and billions of viewers around the globe. If all went according to plan, foreign journalists would write about Argentine soccer star Mario Kempes rather than the disappeared. For a regime increasingly isolated abroad and facing growing criticism from the Carter administration, the World Cup seemed a valuable public-relations opportunity.
There is a particular kind of delusion that afflicts unaccountable regimes. After years of making journalists disappear and bullying critics into silence, the generals failed to consider that the swarm of observers descending upon Argentina might notice the stench of death. Their PR strategy backfired, and the junta lost control over the narrative as journalists looking for goals found torture chambers, corpses washed ashore, grieving families, and the Madres.
Not often do sports journalists carry the lead on political reporting, but many suspected something was amiss when Argentina entered its decisive second-round match against Peru needing a four-goal victory to reach the final, and somehow won 6–0. The suspicions were not unfounded—the game was fixed. Subsequent investigations and testimony linked the match to a broader arrangement between the Argentine and Peruvian dictatorships involving a $50 million financial package, grain shipments, and the transfer of Peruvian dissidents through Operation Condor. Before kickoff, Videla had even postured in the Peruvian locker room, accompanied by war criminal and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whose Lone Ranger diplomacy repeatedly undermined Carter’s human-rights agenda and left Argentine officials with the impression that American objections to human rights violations “were largely perfunctory, a temporary outburst of moral fervor reflecting pressure from a few misguided human rights zealots in the Congress and non-governmental organizations,” and that “Argentina would be protected for the duration of its ‘dirty war’ by friends in the U.S.” Washington’s commitment to human rights was indeed fleeting, as was the junta.
The first rule of running a pariah state is simple: don’t invite witnesses. The Argentine junta believed the World Cup would improve their image, but the stench of death was too strong—the tournament amplified international criticism and further exposed a dictatorship that had grown accustomed to clandestine impunity. Argentina won the Cup, but the regime unravelled four brutal years later, and Videla was later convicted multiple times of murder, torture, and kidnapping. The World Cup has come to America. Let the inspections begin.
–=≈=–
Richard M. Balzano is an historian and political analyst peddling truths at several institutions of higher learning, quietly devoted to the art of sedition and comfortably resigned to the peripheral left.