Rugby's victims of Argentina's dirty war show sport cannot evade politics
A new novel, The Silenced, tells the story of the La Plata squad wiped out in the years building up to football’s 1978 World Cup
The La Plata rugby team who were killed in the 1970s with Otilio
Pascua in the middle of the bottom row.
Photograph: www.desaparecidos.org
Dozens of sports books land on my desk every year. Few, though, have ever packed the gut punch of The Silenced, an extraordinary story that was finally published in English last week. It tells the shocking true tale of what happened when one of the finest rugby teams in Argentina defied the state. Anyone who still believes the dastardly deceit that sport and politics shouldn’t mix should read it – and hastily repent.
It begins with an interview with Raúl Barandiarán, the sole survivor of the original La Plata 1st XV rugby squad from 1975. Every one of his 20 teammates, the Italian author Claudio Fava writes, were murdered: “gunned down, assassinated, ‘disappeared’, in an attempt to tear a generation – an entire squad – out by its roots”.
This was no ordinary squad. La Plata, based in a coastal suburb of Buenos Aires, were one of the leading clubs in Argentina. “They were a good group of guys,” Barandiarán says. “The best – we were unbeatable at sevens. But we never got called up to the national side. Rugby is a right-wing sport in Argentina, and we were on the left.” And being on the left during the “dirty war” in the 70s and early 80s, when 30,000 people suspected of opposing the government were tortured, killed or disappeared, was a dangerous place to be.
The first to be murdered, on Good Friday 1975, was the scrum-half Hernan Rocca, who had decided to stay at home while most of the team toured Europe. “They followed him home from training one night,” says Barandiarán of the paramilitary group Triple A (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance). “They stopped him en route and they murdered him right there on the Pan-American Highway. They put 19 bullets in him.” He was 21 years old.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/apr/05/rugby-argentina-dirty-war-la-plata-1978-world-cup
