Grandad is in jail but his boys are still on the terraces in a country which sponsors football hooliganism
SOCCER:Amaranta Wright
ON a Sunday in the football season the Buenos Aires stadium of the Boca Juniors Club is heaving, but for an empty strip behind the goal, reserved as usual. Suddenly, tearing through the pre-match lull, a torrent of coloured bands come rippling down into the gap over a mass of 500 or so avalanching bodies. They are the supporters called the Barra Brava, literally “The Wild Bunch”.
Three tiers of concrete beams, about five metres long and a foot wide, raise this mob’s beefy leaders above the rest. As they hold on to the giant blue-and-yellow ribbons with one hand to keep balance and swing their shirts with the other, their subjects below begin to rush from one side to the other side like mad ants. And the first song is born. “We are Boca’s No 12/ Our heads are flying/ We move a bit here/ We move a bit there/ With the most sensational rhythm.”
The players trickle out on to the pitch. And while the crowd disappears under a shower of white paper, you can scarcely see those driven wild by the momentum. Long dark curls swirling, tanned bodies run around in circles and crash into each other trance- like at the bottom of the stands.
Every Argentine football club has its Barra Brava. They are the clubs’ fanatical royalty, the team’s 12th player. They get paid by players, club managers and presidents just to give the game its folklore – the colour, the song and the passion which keeps it Argentina’s obsession.
Until recently the Barra Brava at Boca were the kings of them all, pampered and pumped up by Argentina’s most popular and lucrative club. The Boca authorities gave them 1 000 tickets a game in return for their faithful fervour.
The club also paid for four or five deluxe coaches, if not an airplane, to take them to games inside Argentina.
“You can’t expect us to go on a normal bus. We’d arrive tired and wouldn’t be able to give the team our all,” said Jose “Raven” Garcia, once No 2 in the hierarchy of Boca’s No 12. And at each World Cup, the club management and the Argentine Football Association (AFA) jointly forked out for 50 of Boca’s elite fans to take their folklore to the world.
Jose “Grandad” Barrita was the man who made Boca’s Barra Brava legendary. He was its chief for 15 years. A prematurely grey fruit seller, he gained friends in high places, from ex-national squad coaches Cesar Menotti and Carlos Bilardo to the AFA head Julio Grondona. He negotiated with players such as Diego Maradona and Claudio Caniggia in the hottest Buenos Aires nightspots and, admits former Boca president Carlos Heller, “the Grandad attended board meetings”.
During the 1986 World Cup, photos appeared proving Grandad’s extraordinary continent- crossing mobility – on Monday he was in Mexico, on Wednesday he was wobbling his beer-belly for Boca at home and on Friday he was back in Mexico waving the Argentine flag again.
Being in the elite of Boca’s Barra Brava was like being a member of a royal court, said Raven. “When you get in to the group, Grandad visits your home and from that moment your whole family is looked after.” Among his boys Grandad distributed the profits from selling the free tickets, plus the donations by players and managers. It became their regular wage.
But now the glory days of Boca’s No 12 are over. The Barra Brava’s 11 leaders were jailed for 13 years last month, convicted of killing two rival fans three years ago, after River Plate, racing to the title, had beaten Boca 2-0 in a one-sided match.
In the Barra Brava’s mind blood had to be spilt. A simple ambush of bullets on a lorry full of River Plate’s homebound boys satisfied their thirst. And in the final result, according to graffiti sprayed all over the city, dead men counted: River 2, Boca 2.
It took Argentina a long time to admit that behind the emotion and loyalty of its Barra Bravas lay mafias who bribed, bullied and killed. With the explosion of football as a multibillion dollar business, the Barra Bravas’ demands got heavier. “When I told Grandad that we weren’t going to accept any type of pressure in how the club was run he began to harass my family, especially my daughter,” said Carlos Heller.
If the team were playing badly Grandad’s mob would go to training sessions to “make suggestions”. And then there were the killings of football vengeance: more than 45 in the last seven years. Something had to be done. But it was not easy, says Marcelo Parilli, prosecutor in the River case, because the sentimentality invested by the public has made this band of professional hooligans probably the world’s most popular mafia.
Indeed, clubs needed them. When Boca play in the interior, Parilli says, the Barra Brava are the club’s marketing machine, because all Argentines support a first division team of Buenos Aires, usually Boca or River, as well as their local team.
“When we travelled they asked us for autographs, they took our pictures, they loved us and feared us,” remembers Raven, who shares a prison block with Grandad. “One time we played Corrientes and when their team lost the other fans began to sing to us, `oh, ahh, ooh, ahh, ooh, you are the Boca kings, we are with you.’ Then they carried Grandad around the pitch twice. That was respect. Boca paid us to get respect and we got it.”
Club authorities were too scared to clamp down on their most faithful fans, claims Parilli. Astonishingly, even during the trial, managers and stars came out to defend the racketeers. Menotti, Bilardo and Maradona had only good words to say for Grandad. And because no one would speak against the deadly 11, the only way to lock them away was by using a law of illicit association – previously applying only to terrorists – thereby making the members of the Barra Brava automatically guilty by association.
Many commentators say the conviction of the mob leaders is thanks to the fact that the presiding judges were women, because the passion of football and even Barra Brava romanticism has in the past clouded the rationality of male judges.
There was also, for the first time, growing public support to break Barra Brava omnipotence in the stadiums. Their violence had been driving families away from matches. Even hard-core fans are fed up.
“I don’t go any more, I can’t put up with the hassle,” said Boca obsessive Gabriel Escoba (29). “Every time you stop jumping or singing and take a rest you get some idiot who starts screaming in your ear `Sing! Sing!’ “
But those found guilty believe that their fate was manipulated by a rebel faction within the No 12 who made use of the River incident to displace Grandad by planting a false witness, a supposedly repentant Barra Brava.
From jail, Raven complains that the new leaders are not of the same ilk. “Grandad ran things in a dignified way. These new guys are just assassins.”
This is the Barra Brava who today flow as a blue-and-yellow river into Boca’s legendary stadium as if nothing has changed. Only, stripped of their old immunity by the new law, which can condemn anyone just for being a Barra Brava, they have to call themselves simply la inchada – the fans.
Grandad watches them on the prison television – shirts swinging, new songs singing. What the television does not show is the killings which still continue in the name of team loyalty. They have not been eliminated as easily as the Barra Brava name.
ENDS