BUENOS AIRES — It was June 1978, the worst of times for a nation in the vise of dictatorship. And the best of times for soccer-obsessed Argentines.
Argentina won its first championship 30 years ago this month, in the only World Cup tournament to be played here. The victory caused a torrent of nationalist pride in a country beaten down by repression.
But the biggest winners probably were the junta leaders, who scored a massive propaganda coup that set back fledgling international efforts to expose their bloody excesses. For Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla and other junta chiefs, futbol was a convenient means to switch the conversation away from the mounting number of victims casually labeled "the disappeared"-- then a catchy new rhetorical surrogate for mass murder.
Three decades later, many Argentines, including some now-graying members of the 1978 national squad, have begun re-examining the dictatorship's overt politicization of the World Cup victory. Several are expected to participate in a symbolic soccer game to commemorate the regime's victims, scheduled for Sunday. The match is to be played at the River Plate Monumental Stadium -- the same venue where Argentina defeated the Netherlands, 3-1, in the hard-fought final on June 25, 1978.
Some commentators now liken that championship to the century's most notorious political manipulation of sports -- the 1936 Berlin Olympics, coopted as a perverse paean to Hitler's Nazi ideology.
"The 1978 World Cup was a gold brooch for repression, a mundial [cup] that was made to wash the faces of the murderers . . . in front of the world," said Mabel Gutierrez, among the organizers of anniversary events focusing on human rights.
The River Plate stadium is less than a mile away from what was once one of the junta's most notorious torture centers, the Naval Mechanics School, where about 5,000 people were held and are believed to have been "disappeared." Prisoners could hear the cheers from the nearby field.
Surviving detainees have recalled Kafkaesque scenes of interrogators taking time out to root for the home team. Guards even encouraged shackled, hooded and half-conscious prisoners to join in the merry-making.
"We won! We won!" the lockup's notorious chief of intelligence, Jorge "El Tigre" (The Tiger) Acosta, shouted over and over, recalled Graciela Daleo, a survivor. "When he said, 'We won,' I was certain that we had lost," Daleo said in a seminal documentary film made here examining the "parallel history" of the 1978 championship. "And we did lose."
