Ruthless gangs run beautiful game

Players such as Juan Sebastian Veron (tattoo) are treated as heroes. Photo / AP

Like many of those living in Villa Fiorito, one of Argentina's most dangerous slums, Jose Mendez takes his shots at glory when he can - like the day five years ago when he slung the shirt of a rival soccer club over his shoulder and paraded through the streets of his neighbourhood like a returning warrior.

Mendez recounts the fight he waged to win his trophy: the crowded streets after a big match; the other fan putting up a struggle; Mendez, pumped up on chemicals and cheap beer, knocking him down, smashing his face and kicking him until he could get the shirt off his back.

"I took the shirt. I put it over my shoulder and walked through the barrio with everyone watching."

As with many poor men across Argentina, soccer has shaped Mendez's identity. He says soccer is the one glorious thing in his life, a chink of colour in the monotony of poverty, crime and unemployment that surrounds him and his family.

But recently his devotion has led him down a different path. Since his glory march through the streets of Fiorito, Mendez has become a barra brava, a self-proclaimed soldier for his club and part of a well-organised violent network of fans that wields almost unfettered power over the multi-million-dollar business of soccer in Argentina.

In practically every major club side - which includes some of the world's most famous teams - the power of the fans is out of control. Using mob violence and intimidation, Argentina's barras bravas cream hundreds of thousands of dollars from the game every year through illegal rackets, money laundering and narcotics, underpinned by police and state corruption, and supported by the clubs and players themselves.

The only way to understand how Argentina's fans have grown so powerful is to witness them first-hand. La Bombonera, Boca Juniors' famous stadium, squats in the heart of the working-class La Boca neighbourhood in the south of Buenos Aires. When I go to a match, the structure shakes underfoot as trumpets blare and thousands of fans jump and dance in a shower of ticker tape.

Next to me, a man wearing a Boca shirt is praying, face raised to the sky. As the players enter the stadium to a roar, he bellows his love for his team. "Boca! Boca! Boca!" he screams, tears running down his face. "I love you, I love you."

Down by the pitch in the "popular" stands, La Doce (The Twelfth Player) - Boca Junior's hardcore fan base - are a tight mass of thrashing bodies, twirling their blue and yellow shirts around their heads, dancing, singing and banging drums. They surge towards the fence separating the fans from the pitch, bodies slamming against the chain-link, screaming their team on to victory.

Yet while La Doce may have the world's most passionate fans in a country that has spawned some of the world's greatest players and most exciting club soccer, the fans have also evolved into one of the most infamous groups of football soldiers.

For ordinary men such as Mendez, the message of the barras bravas is that everybody can benefit, as long as they don't mind getting their hands dirty. "For me it was like a dream, to go to the match every week, to be someone," he explains. "At the games we're welcomed like heroes. You don't need to go through security." He stops and raises his hands in a victory salute. "In there we're like the kings of the stadium!"

He agreed to speak to me on condition I change his name.

"These people, the bosses who run the barras bravas, they don't care who you are; if you cross them, they will hunt you down and come after you and your family."

Soccer in Argentina has always been bloody, but in the past decade things have escalated. An estimated 190 people have now died in soccer-related incidents in Argentina, 14 in the past 18 months. In 2002, after five people were killed and countless others left with gunshot and knife wounds, the Argentinian Government declared violence in soccer a national emergency.

The violence has shifted away from the terraces into the streets as rival barras fight for control in a blaze of firefights, drive-by shootings and mafia-style executions. But Mendez still believes he is taking part in something glorious. "What else do we have to be proud of if it isn't our team or the club shirt on our backs?" he asks.

He gestures angrily around his house, at the crumbling walls and the damp mattresses where his six children sleep. He takes me outside and points to two teenagers sitting under a faded mural of Villa Fiorito's most famous son - Diego Maradona. For a few pesos, locals take tourists to see the pitch where he honed his skills, now nothing more than a patch of cracked, weed-clogged concrete, or to look at the rubbish-strewn front yard of the Maradona family house.

The boys lean back and smoke paco, a cheap, toxic mix of cocaine base paste. "Those two boys, they used to play football with my sons," says Mendez. He points to one; what was once a leg is now a stump wrapped in dirty bandages. "That kid, he was so high on that stuff he lay on the railway tracks and was hit by a train. In a year they'll both be dead."

For Mendez, Maradona is proof of the transformational power of soccer. Here, he says, nobody but the footballers leave the villa.

"Maradona grew up in these streets," says Mendez. "He was given a gift and he got his whole family out. Carlos Tevez, he was the same. He came from nothing and now he's a superstar."

Despite his best efforts, Mendez hasn't made a good barra soldier. He has neither the constitution for violence nor the head for business.

A few days later he takes me to meet someone who does.

Pepe Diaz has moved quickly up the ranks. He exudes a sense of ownership over his team. For Diaz the barras bravas are doing nothing more than taking what is rightfully theirs.

"Here in Argentina we are football, it belongs to us," says Diaz.

"The players, the clubs, they owe everything to us. Why should we sit back while the suits get rich? We are just taking our cut."

Carlos de los Santos, from Argentina's new Security Unit for Live Sporting Events, which the Government set up to deal with mounting violence in the game, looks weary when I ask him why there has been so little progress.

"Corruption is endemic in Argentina and it is what has allowed the barras to get so powerful," he says. "To break the barras you have to sever their political connections and root out those police complicit in their activities and this is going to be hard."

Argentina's frontline in the war against the barras bravas comes in the unlikely form of Liliana Suarez de Garcia, a softly spoken woman in her late 60s. On her lapel is a badge bearing the face of her son, Daniel, killed outside a game in Uruguay during the Copa America in 1995. For years after his death she fought for those responsible to be brought to justice, until she realised there were dozens of other families also losing sons.

Now, as president of her own organisation, Familiares de las Victimas de la Violencia en el Futbol Argentino (Families of the Victims of Violence in Argentinian Football), she has emerged as one of the only voices calling for action.

"Every day I wake crying for my child," she says. "His death was so tragic but nobody helped me, there has been no justice because those who killed him have the protection of the police and of the state.

"It has to stop because at the moment those who are profiteering are getting away with murder."

Bosses rule with fear

At the top of Argentina's football mafia are the bosses - the half-dozen ruthless men who rule through fear.

Each is estimated to make up to 100,000 pesos a year ($29,000) in a country where 30 per cent of the population live below the poverty line.

At the bottom are the football fans who are given free beer, amphetamines and dope and then dispatched to the matches to sing for their side and do the bidding of the bosses in the streets.

In the middle are men like Pepe Diaz who are increasingly making the barras bravas a criminal force to be reckoned with.

"I had to show my loyalty to the club, so at first it was just the fighting, showing you're willing to do what it takes," he says. "Then when they trust you, you can start to get involved with the money. Then you're really part of it."

Diaz started by roaming the streets around stadiums charging fans 40-60 pesos to park their cars nearby. He estimates he made about 2000 pesos in commission per game.

"First you start off doing the parking, then you move on to flogging tickets outside the game," he says, alleging that during the matches he runs guns and drugs, mostly speed and marijuana, through the stands.

"Inside the stadium is where a lot of the real action happens, because in there we're basically untouchable.

"We can do whatever we want. It's our territory."

It is estimated that the most powerful barras pull in thousands every month through ticket and parking rackets and by controlling the lion's share of merchandise and refreshments inside stadiums. And it doesn't stop there.

Argentine journalist Gustavo Grabia claims the biggest barras also receive up to 30 per cent of transfer fees when a player leaves and up to 20 per cent of some players' pay cheques.

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