The junta wasn’t going to let the World Cup stop its work. An evocative term more accurately describing the victims of state-sponsored murder. The largest and most notorious of several hundred such concentration camps, this was one place where “ Los Desaparecidos” were taken. In earshot of the stadium drums, just a few streets away, inside the tree-lined campus of the Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics, the junta’s flagship torture centre continued to operate. Why We Should Have Boycotted Putin's World Cup
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The ITV commentator Gerald Sinstadt, through crackling audio which added to the atmosphere of this distant live broadcast, fumbled for fillers as the somewhat ponderous spectacle unfolded, remarking on how the opening ceremony’s “emphasis is firmly on the innocence of youth, free from any suggestion of political involvement”.īack in the ITV studio, against a beige backdrop, guest pundit Kevin Keegan, in an extravagantly lapelled check shirt even by Seventies’ standards, bemoaned England’s failure to qualify and declared his excitement at the “soccer festival” ahead. Minutes earlier, General Jorge Rafaél Videla, the bird-like, moustachioed leader of Argentina’s ruling military junta, announced to the nearly 80,000-strong crowd that the tournament would be played under a sign of peace. A flock of what looked more like pigeons than doves was released into the sky. From the blimp camera, the choreographed children first spelled out “Argentina 78” before the words “Mundial Fifa”. On a clear afternoon on 1 June 1978 at the revamped El Monumental stadium in Buenos Aires’ Belgrano barrio, several hundred children in white uniforms moved into their prepared positions, on an uneven pitch, newly turfed since the original grass had withered after being irrigated with sea water.