Blood and terror
How Jorge Rafael Videla’s dictatorship staged the 1978 World Cup.
Drawing by Sammy Moody
Thore Haugstad
7 Dec 2022
On 24 March 1976, the Argentine army pulled off a state coup that would lead to one of the most barbaric dictatorships in history and the ‘disappearance’ of at least thirty thousand people. On the day general Jorge Rafael Videla seized power, the military—known as La Junta—spread to every city in the country. Several hundred union officials were taken out on vessels moored in the Plata River and shot. The Junta shut down congress and the judiciary. They suspended all political parties and threatened the press. They then came after anyone who had, or might think about, opposing the regime—by kidnapping, torture and death. Amid the terror, the Junta also planned an event designed to wash clean their reputation. In two years, Argentina would host the World Cup.
The Argentines had wanted the World Cup since 1938. They got it at the FIFA Congress in London in 1966, a week after general Juan Carlos Onganía had come to power in a coup that would kickstart ten years of chaos. By 1973 Argentina was broke, the army was cracking down on worker protests and right-wing death squads were attacking students and radicals. In June that year, Argentina went back to democracy with the return of Juan Perón, the populist president who had ruled from 1946 to 1955 before a coup had forced him into exile. But even among his supporters, factions clashed. As his plane landed in Buenos Aires, right-wing snipers opened fire on a group of liberal Peronists, killing at least thirteen. The anarchy would only get worse.
When Perón died in July 1974, he was succeeded by his third wife, Isabelita, a nightclub dancer he had met in Panama. Unequipped to lead the country, she saw Argentina slip to the brink of civil war. The state moved to the right as police and a violent army suppressed unions and dissidents. In 1975 Isabelita appointed Videla as the head of the army. He said, “As many people as necessary must die in Argentina so that the country will again be secure.” By late March 1976 inflation had passed three hundred percent. In Buenos Aires a bomb went off every three hours and there was a political assassination every five hours, writes Jonathan Wilson in Angels With Dirty Faces. On 15 March a car bomb went off outside the army headquarters in Buenos Aires, killing one and injuring twenty-nine. Nine days later Videla staged his coup, and Isabelita was taken away from the Casa Rosada in a helicopter.
The military immediately launched the Process of National Reorganisation, know as El Proceso. They hunted down anyone they perceived as political opponents, above all the urban guerrilla group Montoneros, but also people such as journalists, teachers, students, doctors, priests and union officials. These were abducted in homes, offices, factories or on the streets. Many were jailed, tortured and killed. Women and children also ‘disappeared’. The Junta called this The Dirty War, a necessary evil to restore social order. They launched a harsh economic plan that cut public spending and tried to halt inflation. As for the press, they got a memo:
“As from today, 22/4/76, it is forbidden to inform, comment or make reference to subjects related to subversive incidents, the appearance of bodies and the death of subversive elements and/or of members of the armed and security forces in these incidents, unless they are reported by a responsible official source. This includes victims of kidnappings and missing persons.”
There was also a World Cup to host. While Videla knew nothing about football, he understood its political power. In 1972 FIFA had said that only economic trouble could take the tournament away from Argentina, but two years later there were doubts about whether they would pull it off. Argentina wanted to build three stadiums, remodel three more, and upgrade roads, airline routes and telecommunications. Yet barely anything had been done. By 1975 the fifth organising committee had been formed. When FIFA came to inspect the facilities, writes David Goldblatt in The Ball is Round, they were shown a park where they were told that a stadium would appear.
The Junta told general Omar Actis to form a new committee. The costs would spiral to $700m, a tenth of the national budget. Where this money would come from was less clear. Before the coup the sports journalist Dante Panzeri had written that “the 1978 World Cup should not take place for the same reasons that a guy who doesn’t have enough cash to put petrol into a Ford T should not buy himself a [Ford] Torino. If he does it, that’s because he’s stealing from somebody.” This appeared clear even to the Junta. Ahead of his first press conference, Actis was expected to criticise the costs. On his way there, he was shot dead. The Junta blamed the Montoneros, though according to Goldblatt, Actis was succeeded by admiral Carlos Alberto Lacoste, the man most likely to have ordered the assassination.
If hosting the World Cup was a challenge, another was to win it. The right-wing regime inherited a coach who could barely stand further to the left. César Luis Menotti was from Rosario, a city of liberal politics and stylish football. His father was a Peronist. The army never liked Perón, and Menotti’s house was shot at twice. When his dad came home and turned on the lights, Menotti would take cover on the floor just in case. After his dad had died, Menotti went into the streets and wrote “Perón will be back” on walls and trucks. As a player he was a stylish striker. Once retired, he worked as a journalist and hung out with professors and intellectuals. He turned to coaching, leading Huracán to the Metropolitano league title in 1973. When Argentina crashed out of the 1974 World Cup, he was hired to restore the honour of the nation. Two years later, Menotti realised he would be doing that on behalf of the leaders he hated the most.
Argentina were playing Poland in a friendly in Chorzów when Videla seized power. When Menotti came home, he wanted to resign. One story says the regime kept him because they wanted to. Another says they could not afford his severance pay. Lurking in the shadows was Juan Carlos Lorenzo, the Boca coach who played anti-fútbol. Since Argentina had lost 4–0 to the Dutch at the 1974 World Cup, some felt Argentina had to toughen up to deal with the Europeans. Menotti disagreed. “My country’s football needs total reorganisation,” he said. “If we could win the World Cup the way I would like us to, it would inspire others to reassess the way we play the game—our basic philosophy. Perhaps it would stop us placing such reliance on violence and cynicism which are the tools of fear. Argentinian football possesses too much skill to need to be afraid.”
Menotti wanted to combine his romantic ideals with other changes. He worked hard on high pressing. Pasta with olive oil replaced steak with fries. He also divided the country into six zones, selected a team for each and had them play each other. In March 1976 he took the squad on a tour to Europe. At one point they were on a train from Kyiv to Moscow having not eaten in more than a day. They got a sausage and a loaf of bread, which they shared so that each got a slice. They also travelled eight hours through a snowstorm to play Hungary in Budapest. “And those were the best games, in which our players ran the most,” said Menotti. “There was this inevitable hunger of glory. You could sense it.”
When Mario Kempes joined Valencia in 1976, Menotti got the Argentine Football Federation (AFA) to block clubs from selling players abroad unless he allowed it. Two years later Menotti named a World Cup squad where only Kempes played beyond the borders. The most debated call centred on Diego Maradona, who at seventeen was already a sensation at Argentinos Juniors. The omission sparked a slew of rumours. One explainer was that Menotti had five options in the number ten role, but some believed he wanted all the glory and feared Maradona would steal the limelight. El Diego later wrote that he’d never forgive Menotti for that “terrible injustice.” When Diego heard the news at the training camp, he cried and cried. When he came home to his family, the mood was “like a funeral”. He stayed up until five in the morning talking to his dad plus his agent and friend, Jorge Cyterszpiler, who bought him pizza. “I swore I would get my revenge,” said Maradona. Two days later, he scored two and assisted two more in a 5–0 win over Chacarita.
As the World Cup edged closer, the horrors of the regime kept being revealed. On 24 March 1977, the anniversary of the coup, the journalist Rodolfo Walsh wrote an open letter to the Junta. Walsh had already had his home raided and some of his friends murdered. “Fifteen thousand missing, tens of thousands of prisoners, four thousand dead, tens of thousands in exiles are the naked numbers of such terror …” he wrote. “With ordinary prisons filled, you have created in the main garrisons of the country virtual concentration camps, where not one judge, lawyer, journalist, international observer can enter.”
Walsh went on to note that twenty-five mutilated bodies had washed up on the shores of Uruguay between March and October 1976; a small portion of those tortured to death and dumped into the Plata River. He said the regime had kidnapped people, drugged them half to sleep, loaded them onto cargo planes and dropped them alive into the South Atlantic. Other corpses had been buried in unmarked graves. The victims, wrote Walsh, were not just guerrilla members but “unarmed opponents, or people who just look suspicious.” As for press freedom, Walsh wrote that “in August 1976, a local man went diving in the San Roque Lake, Córdoba, and discovered a genuine swamp of a cemetery. He went to the precinct, where they would not file his report, and he wrote to the papers, where they would not publish it.”
Yet for all the terror, Walsh reserved his most biting critique for the economic policy. “You only have to walk around Greater Buenos Aires for a few hours before quickly realising that these policies are turning it into a slum with ten million inhabitants,” he wrote. “Cities in semi-darkness; entire neighbourhoods with no running water because the monopolies rob them of their groundwater tables; thousands of blocks turned into one big pothole because you only pave military neighbourhoods and decorate the Plaza de Mayo; the biggest river in the world is contaminated in all of its beaches because minister [José Alfredo] Martínez de Hoz’s associates are sloughing their industrial waste into it, and the only government measure you have taken is to ban people from bathing.”
On 25 March, Walsh mailed his letter to the press.
A few minutes later he was shot dead.
Few dared to voice such criticism. One of the newspapers who did oppose the regime was the Buenos Aires Herald, whose editor, Robert Cox, was illegally arrested in April that year. His family was often threatened. That same month mothers turned up at the Plaza de Mayo with photos of their missing children. They began meeting up each Thursday to march to the Casa Rosada in white headscarves, a sight that drew international interest. The regime dismissed them as ‘las locas’. In October 1977 the mothers published an article in the daily paper La Prensa. “We only ask for the truth,” it read. “Who should we ask to know the truth about the fate of our children? We ask to know if our disappeared are dead or alive. Where are they?”
They refused to be silenced. On 10 December, Human Rights Day, they took out an ad in a paper that published the names of the missing children. That same evening one of the founding women, Azucena Villaflor, was kidnapped from her home by armed men. Nobody heard from her again. Her remains were identified in 2005, when it turned out that she and two of the founding madres had been murdered. Villaflor had been taken aboard a military plane and thrown into the Plata River, before her corpse had washed up on a beach.
Abroad, the uproar over the violence in Argentina grew. When the foreign minister, César Augusto Guzzetti, went to the UN General Assembly in New York, he was lambasted by journalists. Amnesty kept count of the disappeared and called for nations to boycott the World Cup. They said that “sports is not separate from politics: the stadiums of Argentina might appear, if not neutral, at least clean, respectable, civilised, protected. The true Argentina, one of prisons, torture, repression of political opposition, will be carefully hidden and denied.” A separate Amnesty slogan said, “Yes to football, no to torture!” Amnesty also told travellers heading to Argentina about the murders. Cox, the Herald editor, summed up the message: “You won’t just see world-class football—they’re killing people here, too.”
In 1977, a group of French intellectuals formed a committee for the boycott of the World Cup. The founder was François Gèze, a young engineer who had lived in Argentina. The movement soon created two hundred smaller groups across France. They spread posters, newsletters and audio messages. One poster showed a soldier planting a gun against the neck of a man, superimposed over a football pitch. “Boycott the dictatorship!” said the text. They also published a manifesto that called for France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and Scotland to stay at home. The message said, “We should not play football amid the concentration camps and torture chambers.”
The Junta responded by hiring the American PR firm Burson-Marsteller, who came up with the slogan, “We Argentinians are honest and humane.” A spokesman said that Argentina was enjoying a period of social peace and that no violence was expected. FIFA did nothing. When Amnesty offered them a copy of their report on human rights abuses in Argentina, they refused to accept it. “I am among those that most depended on the hard work that your country undertook and I haven’t been disappointed,” the FIFA president, João Havelange, told the Argentine press. “It fills me with pride, first from knowing that Argentina responded to the challenge and second because I am also South American. We have achieved everything we proposed.”
On 23 May 1978, a few days before the French team were about to fly to Argentina, the team’s coach, Michel Hidalgo, left his country house near Bordeaux with his wife to drive to the train station. A car cut across the road and forced him to stop, according to Papelitos, a site dedicated to stories of the 1978 World Cup. Four men came out of the car. One was armed. They were there to kidnap him. They took him out into the woods, where Hidalgo disarmed the man with the gun and escaped. He drove with his wife to a police station, where he handed in the weapon. The officers told him it was unloaded. That night AFP got an anonymous call from a group who claimed responsibility for the attempt. “With this purely humanitarian action,” the group said, “we wanted to call attention to France’s hypocritical complicity as the principal exporter of military materiel to Argentina, and denounce that they are supporting Videla’s massacres with their World Cup participation.”
The boycott committee did not convince any teams. Some said Johan Cruyff listened, but he and his family were under police surveillance after a kidnapping attempt at their home in Barcelona. The only player who did boycott was Paul Breitner. Overall, Gèze found that most of the football world ignored their calls. “Many people didn’t want to know about it,” he said.
Even parts of the press ignored their pleas. L’Équipe backed the World Cup for “sporting reasons”. The committee responded with a parody newspaper called L’Épique. A spoof headline read:
“ARGENTINA 78: THE MASSACRE CONTINUES … NOW FOR THE FOOTBALL!”
The regime was desperate to put on a good show. They had cleared some of the shanty towns in Buenos Aires, putting tens of thousands on trains out of the city. A giant concrete wall had been built next to one of the major motorways to hide the poverty. The World Cup committee said the enormous costs would be recouped by the arrival of half a million tourists. Fewer than ten thousand turned up.
One who did show was Henry Kissinger, a guest of honour. He spent five days hanging out with Videla, drinking mate and shaking hands with locals. “I believe Argentina will be champions,” he told the press. A less fortunate visitor was Rod Stewart, who had gone to support Scotland. Almost as soon as he had arrived, writes Papelitos, he was attacked in a bar, and within a day he was back on a plane to Europe.
On the eve of the tournament, Videla received the Argentina team at his palace. He said, “Like the commander says to his troops before battle, you will be winners.” The next day a military band announced his entrance at the Estadio Monumental, where West Germany would meet Poland for the opener. Present was also Juan Carlos Aramburu, the Catholic archbishop of Argentina, who had said that the disappeared were not actually dead but were living happily in Europe. Hundreds of white doves were released. Videla hailed a World Cup that would be “played under the sign of peace”. In the Plaza de Mayo, another rally bega from the mothers of the murdered children.
Argentina faced Hungary the next day at the Monumental. They were playing at night, so that the hosts knew the other results. Menotti wore a coat, collar turned up, smoking a cigarette. Argentina won 2–1, a good start to a group that also featured France and Italy. After the win a Junta official came over to the Argentine striker Leopoldo Luque. Earlier that day, the brother of a close friend of his had disappeared, and his corpse would later turn up on the banks of the Plata River with concrete attached to the legs. The officer now told Luque that “this could turn out to be the group of death as far as you are concerned.” Then the officer smiled.
Argentina were lucky against France. Didier Six had a strong penalty shout turned down, and instead the hosts got a penalty when Marius Tresor slipped inside the area and touched the ball with his hand. When Luque made it 2–1 in the second half, the noise inside the Monumental “was like a jet engine”. One story claims that after France had been denied a penalty, the referee, Jean Dubach, told Argentina captain Daniel Passarella, “Don’t do that again please, or I might have to actually give it next time.”
True or not, Argentina weren’t in total control. They lost their last game, against Italy, and finished second in the group, a debacle that ratcheted up the anxiety in the dressing room. Kempes later said that he was smoking ten cigarettes a day, and that he wasn’t the only one.
The first group stage was over. Scotland had crashed out, capping an ill-fated stay that had included an unfinished hotel, a swimming pool with no water in it and a team bus that broken down on the way there. Tunisia had beaten Mexico 3–1 to seal a first World Cup win for an African nation. Peru had finished ahead of the Netherlands, and Austria had come ahead of Brazil. The Brazilians had reasons to feel aggrieved. They had been drawing 1–1 against Sweden when they were given a late corner by Welsh referee Clive Thomas. Zico headed in the winner, but Thomas had blown the final whistle while the ball was in the air. Brazil went mad, but 1–1 it was. Brazil were also the only team that had to play all their group games at the new Estadio José María Minella in Mar del Plata, where the pitch was deemed ‘nearly unplayable’.
The torture and killings did not stop during the World Cup. Many of the “secret” concentration camps were in the centre of major cities. The most infamous was the Navy School of Mechanics, just down the road from the Monumental. Several thousand captives were held in the basement, shackled, hooded and silenced. They could hear the cheers from the stadium. When the staff were away, the prisoners would discuss the games too. “They talked a lot about the World Cup, especially about Menotti, and whether he really had been in the Communist Party,” said Graciela Daleo, one of the surviving prisoners, according to Papelitos. “I had no idea what Menotti’s strategy was, nor could I understand—I still don’t—which tactics should be used: 4-3-3, 4-4-2 or something like that. People would talk about that for hours.”
Argentina ended up in the next group with Brazil, Poland and Peru. They won 2–0 against Poland, who were said to have entered the country with four hundred bottles of vodka. The goals were scored by Kempes, who also saved a goal on the line with his hand. There was no red card for that in those days, so Poland only got a penalty—which Kazimierz Deyna missed. Hours earlier Brazil had beaten Peru 3–0. Next came a goalless draw between Argentina and Brazil that featured seventeen fouls in the first ten minutes. In the final round Argentina again played last, so when Brazil hammered Poland 3–1, the hosts knew they had to beat Peru by four goals. Brazil were outraged that their rivals got this advantage. Their complaints were ignored.
The night before the game, the Peru players were disturbed as they were sleeping. The security guards outside their hotel disappeared, enabling Argentina fans to encircle the building, singing and honking car horns until the early hours. On the day of the game, the Peru bus got mysteriously lost en route to the stadium, making a thirty-minute trip take two hours. They turned up an hour before kickoff. Then Videla entered the Peru dressing room. He is said to have wished the team good luck and stressed the importance of South American solidarity. One player said it was “terrible”, another called it “frightening.”
Argentina beat Peru 6–0. Brazil were out, the hosts were in the final. That Peru had hit the post twice at 0–0 might have calmed suspicions around the game, but in Brazil the media pointed out that the Peru goalkeeper, Ramón Quiroga, was born in Rosario. Others questioned why the in-form midfielder José Velásquez had been taken off after fifty-one minutes. Eight years later an anonymous civil servant claimed that Argentina had shipped thirty-five thousand tons of grain to Peru and unfrozen $50m of Peruvian assets as part of a deal. Menotti dismissed all such theories. Peru had not played badly, he said. Argentina had just played well.
The Dutch also made the final. By now the Argentina players were so nervous that not even smoking did the trick. On the eve of the final the third goalkeeper, Héctor Baley, asked Kempes if he wanted to go fishing. “I don’t like fishing,” Kempes later said. “But sometimes the pressure is too much.” They brought along the midfielder Américo Gallego, grabbed some rods and pastries, and left the camp in the middle of the night. Braving the winter cold, they found an abandoned ship in the Paraná River and fished until 5am. When they came back, the handed four fish to the chef. “Our table had a special menu before the final,” Kempes told FourFourTwo. “All the other players couldn’t believe it.”
The AFA did what they could to ensure victory. The designated referee was the Israeli official Abraham Klein, who had been spotless all tournament. But Klein had been in charge when Italy had beaten Argentina, and he had turned down to Argentine penalty shouts. Now the AFA argued that Klein was an inappropriate choice due to the political links between Israel and the Netherlands. Somehow, their complaint succeeded. The refereeing commission replaced Klein with Sergio Gonella of Italy, a country with close ties to Argentina.
The Dutch preparations were bad. On their way to the stadium, the bus took a strangely long route via a village, where it got stuck for twenty minutes as locals banged the windows and shouted “Argentina! Argentina! Argentina!” Some of the players were “frightened,” said the defender Rudi Krol. When the Dutch walked out on the Monumental, the Argentina team were ten minutes later, forcing the visitors to take a barrage of whistles and insults. Then Argentina complained that the plaster cast on the wrist of René van de Kerkhof was illegal. He had worn it all tournament, but Gonella forced him to put on an extra layer of padding.
Before kickoff Menotti had told his players that they represented “the only thing that is legitimate in this country—football”. He said, “We are not going to look at the stage-box of the authorities people … We are going to look at the terraces, to all the people, where perhaps sits the father of each of us, because there we will find the metalworkers, the butchers, the bakers and the taxi drivers.”
As the game kicked off amid a hail of shredded toilet roils and newspapers, the nation was watching. Down the road in the Navy School of Mechanics, about twenty prisoners huddled in front of a TV. Kempes scored the opener, but Dick Nanninga made it 1–1 with eight minutes left. In stoppage time, Rob Rensenbrink had a huge chance that would almost certainly have made the Dutch winners and him the tournament top scorer. He hit the post. As the ball bounced against the woodwork, the Monumental was quiet as a cemetery. “But that made us react,” said the midfielder Omar Larrosa. “If that didn’t go in, this was our World Cup.”
Before extra time Menotti told the team to stay calm and trust their fitness. Kempes made it 2–1, before Bertoni added a third. Argentina were champions. As fans stormed the pitch, Havelange gave the trophy to Videla, who handed it to Passarella. Videla declared that “all the nation had triumphed.” In the pictures, Passarella is lifted up with the trophy as dark clouds gather above the stadium.
The Dutch never arrived to pick up their medals. Some of the Argentine players later said they did not known the extent of the cruelty that had surrounded their victory. The goalkeeper Ubaldo Fillol asked for forgiveness. Luque said the tournament should never have been played. Alberto Tarantini said that before he shook the hand of Videla, he had used the same hand to grab his balls. René Houseman also shook Videla’s hand, though he later said that, had he known about the terror, he’d have preferred to cut it off.
Menotti never seemed to regret his involvement. “What should I have done?” he asked Jimmy Burns many years later. “Coach teams to play badly, to base everything on tricks, to betray the feelings of the people? No, of course not … we were conscious and we all knew at the time that we played for the people. A people that, in the moment in Argentina, needed a new point of departure for doing together something different.”
In Buenos Aires, people flooded the streets in celebration. In the Navy School of Mechanics, one of the guards came screaming, “We won! We won!”
Daleo thought, “If they won, we lost.”
She was soon ordered into a green Peugeot 504. Two officers wanted to drive her around to make her see the scenes in the city. At one point she asked if she could peer through the sunroof for a better view. They said yes. “I stood up on the seat and looked at that multitude,” she would say. “That was another moment of terrible solitude. I was crying. I was certain that if I began to shout that I was a ‘disappeared’, then no one would even notice.”
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