BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — The death of Ramon Aramayo exposed, again, the unrelenting violence that scars Argentine soccer.
The San Lorenzo fan and father of two made the mistake of objecting to a security check last month as he approached the stadium of opposing Buenos Aires club Velez Sarsfield. Exactly what he said or did isn’t known, but the confrontation lasted only seconds before several police wrestled him to the asphalt, face-down.
“Aramayo resisted being frisked, and witnesses told me what followed was a brutal beating by police,” said Gustavo Grabia, a journalist and expert on Argentine hooliganism. “They used excessive force. He was taken down to the ground. They hit him in the back, in the legs, they squeezed his testicles.
Not everything is clear. He was able to get up and walk, but passed out.”
“Basically, they pulled him out of the line and pummeled him,” Grabia added in an interview with The Associated Press. Aramayo was pronounced dead minutes later, and three officers were suspended the next day. Aramayo’s autopsy showed bruising from police blows, but it said he probably died of heart failure — or traumatic shock — brought on by the assault.
His was the country’s 13th soccer-related death in just over a year.
While the vicious beating of an opposing fan at a Los Angeles Dodgers game prompted city police to rework security at Dodger Stadium, soccer violence and its toll in Argentina is on a different scale. It’s also distinct from the thuggish brutality associated with English hooliganism, which has prompted several pieces of anti-violence legislation in Britain over the last 25 years.
Mayhem threatens almost every match in Argentina, whether the perpetrators are individual fans, police or hooligan gangs. In a nation with a proud soccer tradition, little is being done about the deadly blight on the game. Grabia and others say the reason is a web of connections that touches hooligan gangs, soccer officials, police and the nation’s highest-ranking politicians.
“It is impossible to combat the problem here,” Grabia said. “The violence is committed by people deeply involved with the clubs, politics and unions.”
On March 20, the day Aramayo died, the 50,000-seat Velez stadium grew unruly as word spread of what had happened. Rival hooligan groups (known in Spanish as “barras bravas” — fierce gangs) shouted sexually graphic insults and taunted each other. Then, seven minutes into the game, San
Lorenzo goalkeeper Pablo Migliore dropped to the ground, struck in the head by an object thrown from the stands.
The crowd grew only more frenzied from there. Shirtless fans climbed a chain-link fence — ripping it free of its moorings, trying to get at black-clad police on the other side braced with batons, shields and a high-powered fire hose.
Club presidents, government officials and police tried to distance themselves from what happened. The Argentine Football Association says such violence is simply an outgrowth of rising street crime in Argentina.
The AFA’s powerful president — and FIFA vice president — Julio Grondona made his first public statement two days after the death in a radio interview.
“I have nothing to say. I’m not making any ‘mea culpa.’ I was in Chile when it happened,” he said. “I’m profoundly sorry that the incident took place within soccer. We have to wait to see what happened.”
The primary way to deal with the violence has been to separate rival fans in the stadiums, most of which are decrepit, with fields ringed by moats and fences.
But with hooligans unable to confront each other at the stadium, the bedlam has increasingly spread to surrounding neighborhoods. One local resident described a shootout several months ago between hooligan groups that took place in front of his house, less than two blocks from the River Plate stadium.
He said club officials apparently had been meeting in the evenings to decide, among other things, which members of the local barra brava would get the lucrative rights to park cars during matches.
- AP