Passion amongst fans infootball is great, but...

[beachesl]

...I shudder everytime I hear comments in forums like this that we need to become more rabid fans like those in other countries.

 

Read this over my morning coffee:   http://www.losandes.com.ar/article/tres-asesinatos-en-la-via-publica-en-una-noche-de-furia-y-sangre

 

Before you decide to rush off to googletranslation, let me give you a quick summary:

 

Final promotion series between two teams in different suburbs of Mendoza city, to get into third level. In the last leg yesterday  in Maipu, Gutierrez of Maipu beat Huracan or Las Heras on penalties. After the match, a celebrating local is shot dead in the street by a visiting Huracan fan. In revenge shortly after, some Gutierrez fans drive to the area of Huracan stadium in Las Heras and randomly shoot two people inthe streets. This story will quickly be  forgotten by all but the family  and friends. 

 

This happens more than anyone knows in Argentina. The province of Mendoza has but 5% of Argentna's population, and is one of the less-woolly areas of the country. This news item is hardly banner level, and will not be bothered to be reported in the rest of the country. Occasionally, word filters through of even more ridiculous football-related deaths in other provinces. Because they occur outside of the stadiums, they never make the lists of hundreds of football deaths over the past decades. I have a student who is a on-call vascular surgeon at the big public hospital for the province who has to operate on football-related shooting victims almost every month,almost always unreported. Like the non-football related robbers shot  by police, most of the "chimbas" (a derogatory term the lower-class) instigators usually survive, it is the more innocent who usually die.   

 

Argentina is but one country among a hundred or so similiar countries in this regard. If there were serious study of soccer violence done, the world-wide statistics would be at least tens of thousands of deaths a year, making ebola look like a tea-party. 

 

I love Argentina and I love football, but sometimes I am proud to be Canadian.