April 21 – Argentina is losing the battle against football hooliganism , according to the president of one of its top clubs. Fans of first division Huracan clashed with police last weekend and an officer was hit in the face by a stone, the latest in a series of violent incidents.
“Here the battle is lost,” Velez Sarsfield president Raul Gamez said in an interview with Reuters.
“The President of the republic says those (fans) who stand on the terraces are good lads,” he said, citing a comment by Cristina Fernandez when a group of barras were preparing for a government-sanctioned trip to the World Cup in South Africa in 2010. “We were good lads 50 years ago when society was different.”
The organisation Salvemos al Futbol (Let’s save football) has published a list of 304 football-related deaths since 1922, 112 of them this century and three this year.
“Politicians need (barras) and use them as violent manual labour. Club directors want to get them off their backs, we make pacts with the barras, there’s no option because there are no guarantees (for our safety),” Gamez said.
“In England, anyone who made a mistake didn’t go to the stadium ever again because the law said so and the next day he was sentenced,” Gamez said, referring to the British government’s crackdown after the dark days of hooliganism.
“Not here, judges are at a disadvantage against lawyers, who have so many ploys that a fan banned from a stadium gets off the next day … the one who went in with a gun.”
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