The empty lots of land which dot the and landscapes of Santiago’s urban periphery were once planned as tree-lined plazas and recreational areas for the residents of the city’s shanytowns, a status that they never attained. Instead, they became the dusty fields on which generations of young people have come of age playing soccer. Soccer is Chile’s most popular sport, a cheap form of entertainment that is deeply etched into the everyday memories of proletarian Santiago. There is no shantytown without a club that brings together those addicted to playing ball. All that neighborhood kids need is a ball and a field to forget, at least for a time, the lack of opportunities that defines the world they inhabit. Each weekend on the neighborhood field, they experience the only real freedom that they know-their only respite from the resentments of growing up poor amidst the Chilean “miracle.”
In Santiago’s peripheral neighborhoods, these dusty fields have become a place beyond the law, a free-trade zone of sorts where poor kids gather to celebrate the triumphs and defeats of their soccer club or just to hang out. Young people no longer fashion their rebellion according to the nostalgic revolutionary ethic of the 1960s. It is the city that stages their expressions of frustration and disenchantment. In Chile at least, soccer fan clubs, known as barras bravas—literally “fierce fan clubs”—are the highest expression of these new militancies. The barras bravas erupted onto the national scene at the outset of the democratic transition in 1990, just as the massive grassroots movement against the Pinochet regime was eclipsed by the return of democratic institutions. Chile’s new rulers were quick to criminalize the discontent expressed by the barra—the same discontent that only a few years earlier had fueled the shanytown uprisings against the Pinochet regime and which eventually brought them to power.
On the soccer field, victories and losses are all the same—both are valid reasons to celebrate. Neighborhood fields come to life after nightfall, when the protective shroud of darkness arrives to shield the revelers from the vigilant eye of the police. There is no shortage of drugs there. Pitos, guiros and macona are some of the names give to the marijuana that freely passes through the lips of the kids on the field. They usually grow it themselves—a dash of green on their otherwise sad and dusty gardens. In the 1980s, marijuana was the most popular drug among kids on the fringes, so much so that its consumption came to be accepted by mothers and relatives who did not see any grave danger in the innocent little plant. “it calms him down” the mothers would say, “and on occasion I’ll even make myself a cup of tea with the leaves when I’m too nervous.” By the 1990s, however, the homegrown herb was displaced by the other offerings of the free market. As cocaine continued to make its way through Chile’s middle and upper classes, pasta base, a highly addictive poor-man’s cocaine made from plaster, the by-products of cocaine production and other powdered garbage, flooded Santiago’s poor neighborhoods.
Entire communities, including some like La Legua and La Victoria, once famous for their activism and militancy, are now devastated by the desperate cravings of hundreds of pasta addicts who appear each night on the edges of the soccer field or under the shadows of neighborhood street lights in search of a fix.
Yet the desolate neighborhood soccer fields bear other memories as well. In the 1980s, at the height of the protests against the Pinochet dictatorship, shantytowns were regularly raided and searched by the regime’s security forces, often in the middle of the night. Shanytown residents would awaken to the thunder of loudspeakers ordering all men to assemble on the local soccer field in military formation. The machine guns carried by the soldiers insured that no one would disobey the order. The troops, often with their faces painted for combat, would kick down doors and break windows as they entered people’s homes, dragging half- dressed husbands, grandfathers, children and youth out of their houses at gun point. Residents were forced to trot to the soccer field boot-camp style, and were beaten if they so much as flinched when asked for their identity card number. Only the city’s shantytowns were subjected to such humiliating rituals of surveillance and intimidation, justified by the regime as part of its war against subversion. These episodes became indelibly etched in the memories of the kids who would eventually join the barras bravas.
The intense memories accumulated in the neighborhood soccer fields made them the physical and symbolic spaces from which the protests against the dictatorship, and later the barras bravas, would emerge. During the 1980s, Santiago’s poor barrios were the cradle of the intense struggle against the Pinochet regime. Molotov cocktails ignited the nights of protest otherwise shrouded in darkness thanks to the organized or random sabotage which often left entire neighborhoods without electricity. Many young sharmytown residents who fought against the military machine with little more than stones were repeatedly detained, tortured and humiliated in the jails of the regime. They spent their adolescent years involved in clandestine militancy, student strikes, school takeovers, vigils for the disappeared, soup kitchens, hunger strikes, and all the other struggles that birthed the return of democratic rule. During the 1988 plebiscite, they actively participated in the marches for the “NO,” which shook the regime and eventually led to the triumph of the Concertación coalition in the closing months of 1989.
The sense of triumph that followed the electoral victory of Patricio Aylwin, who came to power with the support of the Socialist Party and other sectors of the left, faded quickly for most poor urban youth. The dictatorship’s repressive apparatus was left almost intactready to quell any kind of social unrest with violence. The police, now authorized by a legitimate democratic regime, soon unleashed a wave of repression directed Specifically at shantytown youth. The government, in what seeimed like an act of vengeance against those who had so fiercely fought against the security forces in the 1980s, passed a law which allowed the police to detain individuals on suspicion alone. Bands of long-haired rockeros hanging out on shantytown street corners and groups of kids drinking beer and listening to music on the local soccer field were routinely rounded up in an attempt to control the “surplus” youth that the neoliberalization of the economy and the transition to democracy had left behind.
The two most important barras—famous for their boundless devotion to their teams—are La Garra Blarica (The White Claw) and Los de Abajo (The Ones From Below). The former is devoted to the Colo-Colo soccer team, one of the country’s most popular first-division clubs named after a heroic indigenous warrior who has been mythified in Chile’s official histories for defending the territory against the Spaniards during the Conquest. La Garra Blanca appropriated the hero’s epic narrative and translated it into the social and economic idioms of its members. The members of La Garra, mostly young men from Santiago’s peripheries, refer to themselves as “Indios, Proletarios, y Rebolucionarios” [1] (Indians, Proletarians and Revolutionaries), contradicting the narrative of upward social mobility so pervasive in contemporary Chilean society. La Garra proudly flaunts the humble origins of its members—they sing about it in their hymns, spray-paint it in their graffiti and shout it in their slogans, defacing the manicured landscapes of the Chilean miracle with their intransigent presence.
La Garra Blanca was formally founded in the late 1980s after generational tensions led to a split among the team’s fans. As Eric, a founding member, describes:
The conflicts had been developing gradually, over many years. In the youth group, there were about 50 of us. Since we were young, we weren’t allowed to participate in the club’s events and parties. Among those on the fringes there were natural leaders like Fatman Jano who was known for his foul mouth and his irreverence towards the rules. He always had problems with the officers of the fan club and was eventually expelled for insulting one of them. At the first game following the incident, he sat down in the stands on the north side of the National Stadiurn and began singing all by himself. We immnediately followed, and that is where it all began.[2]
This original group of rebellious Colo-Colo fans had ways of celebrating their beloved soceer team which were radically different from the orderly afternoons at the stadium sponsored by the official fan club. Boxes of wine and marijuana joints would make their way around the stands. Out of nowhere, someone would shout, “Death to Pinochet,” incorporating the political slogans of the moment into the mantras of the fans. The new barra grew by leaps and bounds until the old fan club disappeared in its shadow.
It did not take long for La Garra to become a massive phenomenon, bringing together over 20,000 youth behind the chant of “Te quiero albo, te llevo en el corazón” (I love you White [the colom of the Colo-Colo jersey], I carry you in my heaurt). During games, wooden stadium bleachers are set ablaze, and sticks, rocks and bottles rain on the playing field. As the fans make their way back to their neighborhoods, dozens of windshields are left shattered. The buses of the barras transport their pubescent mayhem throughout the country, following their team wherever it may go as they sing:
I was born in a neighborhood made of tin and cardboard
I have smoked pot aind I have felt love
I have been to jail many times, and many times I have lost my voice
Now with democracy everything remains the same
We ask ourselves how lonng we can put up with it
Now that I am from below [refening to the namne of the barra]
I understand the situationn
There are only two options—to be a hell-raiser and join the ‘rebolucion'[4]
Colo-Colo officials court the media in an effort to distance the team from the mayhem, which they blame on the left-wing extremists who have corrupted the otherwise wholesome souls of the fans. While Santiago’s political authorities insist that the club must pay the millions of pesos in damages artd injuries, elub officials refuse, stating again and again that the Garra Blanca operates beyond the lirnits of their control. After all, they say, La Garra was expelled from the official fan club years ago.
The love-struck fervor of Garra fans is orphaned, unrecognized by the official institution for which it is proclaimed. It stubbornly resists domestication. The Law on Violence in Stadiums, whieh imposed stiff jail sentences and other penalties for soccer-related offenses, did not deter barristas from their enamored pursuits. Fans meet clandestinely in neighborhood dives or on local soccer fields to plan their actions, organizing their movements through the city in strategic neighborhood-based groups. Los Killers, Los Incansables, La Río, Holocausto, Los Gangsters de Cerro Navia, and Los Rebolucionalbos[4] are some of La Garra’s “working groups,” a term they use with bitter irony, a commentary on the rampant unemployment of the group’s members.
Several years ago, soccer authorities launehed a campaign to promote the affiliation of the barras with the official fan elubs of their teams—to those who would give their name, date of birth, identity card number and address, the official fan clubs were offering all kinds of gifts and benefits—materials to replace their old ban-ners tattered from urban warfare, new drums to reinvig-orate their heartbeat in the stadium bleachers, an easily accessible office to coordinate fan activity and
resources for future projects. These offers in part resulted from the pressure that the government was putting on soccer authorities to control their fans. “As if we were ehildren,” conhmented Eric of La Garra Blanea, “they offered us toys in exchange for our freedom’ ” Erie was adamant that the fans would never be sedueed by such blackmail. Meanwhile, barra rnem-bers tirelessly proclainh their irhdependence: “I don’t want to work, I don’t want to study, I’m not going to affiliate, I want to sing to the White all day, and fuek up the chuncho (the rival Universidad de Chile team) and the police.”
After so many years undergmound, La Garra has learned to operate with its own limited resources-takhng up collections to repair the drum, putting on heavy metal benefiht concerts and organizing parties to publish the La Garra Blanca magazine, which they say is the official and authentie voice of the fans. So far, the GarTa has published three issues of its magazine, which has a circulation of 3,00O and includes photographs, glossy paper, high-quality printing and only minimal advertising-at a cost of over $13,000 per issue. In all likelihood, the money comes from a combination of pirate ventures administered by La Garra, ineluding theft and other illicit undertakings. On one occasion, they accepted funding for a new 70-foot banner from the Milled Trophy Company on the eondition that they put the company’s name and logo on it. When they unfurled it, the nairte of their eorporate sponsor was nowhere to be found, ostensibly because the eops had ripped that part of the barmer off in a scuffle before the game-any exeuse to avoid selling one’s sotul to thue market.
While the barristas’ most fervent desire is to see their team victorious on the field, their passion goes beyond the tearn and the players at any particular moment. “Players come and go,” comments Eric with a hint of sadness in his voice, “but the barra remains.” Eric bitterly compared his own situation to that of the players, who are paid millions of pesos eaeh month. Forgetting his fanaticism for an instant, he wonders what the future rmhight hold for him and those like him who live in a system which affords no guarantees. I tell him that soccer is a transnational industry in whieh people are bought and sold like slaves based on their ability to move their legs. “That is true he responds, “but it is the only possibility that a lot of people have to get out of the barrio and beeome somebody. We like Ivan ‘Bam Bam’Zamorano, for example, because even though he has become rieh and famous, he has never forgotten his class.” But only a handful of kids ever reach the fiirst-division soccer league, while the rest remain beating their drum in the stadium stands where La Garra Blanca stages its weekly speetacle.
“It is the only free m I know,” proclaims Eric as he describes the barristas’ strategy of entrenching themselves in one part of the stadium to proteet thems ‘ elves from poliee aggressi’on, or a rival barra. “There, am someone else,” he states as he reeounts the strategies he and his friends use to smuggle into the stadium the alcohol and marijuana that enliven their weekly party. At the gates of the stadium, they are frisked by cops and sniffed by dogs, but the aleohol makes it in anyway, usually in plastie bags that they hide in their crutches. “It’s the only part of our bodies that they don’t touch;’he recounts with a smile, memembering one time when the stands were so crowded and the movement so intense that a bag of pisco broke and spilled alh over his irhner thigh, making him run o the bathroom several times to put water on his legs to ease the burning.
The identities of individuals are ahso concealed arud transmuted through the multiple names and nicknames used to elude the police and the files of the official fan club. Barristas identify caeh other through names like Viper, la Chiea Sandra, Palomo, Rodilla, Bartiarti and Jota- without last names, without a past and without families because their only family is their passion for the barra.
Onhy a few women participate in the euphoria of the bar-i-as. They are usually women who were once girl friends, sisters or friends of barra kids who, after accompanying them tlarough countless triumphs and defeats, earn their place amidst the multitude of maehos. Acceptance, however, is not without its price. In order to earn the respect of the barristas, women must transforn themselves by masculinizing theim ges-tures and their language to prove they deserve a place in the violent territory of the stadium bleachers. “At fimst it concerned us;’Jorge remembered, reiterating the cliehé of feminine fragihity. “We had to follow them arourud to protect them from the eops and the rival barra. ” Soon, however, they realized that their women eomrades were just as fileree as they are. The women who wield stieks, throw stones and yell team slogans are hardly delieate flowers.
There aTe countless motives underlying the barras ‘ rage. On one oceasion, as the barristas made their way home from the stadium, they ran across a store selling Hush Puppy shoes, whieh in Chile are prohibitively expensive for everyone but the middle and upper classes. They ransacked the store, leaving their old beat-up shoes in the store window. There are also more explicitly political reasons that arouse the barristas’ire, such as Pinochet’s presence in the Senate. I saw them at the massive demonstration outside the National Congress on the day the dietator made his shameful entrance into the legislature in March 1998. There they were wearing ski masks and ready for eombat, just like Subcomandante Marcos but on skateboards. Amidst the smoke of tear-gas grenades, they fought the eops with an artillery of rocks thrown from behind their barricades. It was diffieult to determine to which of the two main barras they belonged, La Garra Blanca or Los de Abajo. In such cireumstances, barristas hide their faees from television cameras and photographers. They also leave the insignia of their teams behind, as their political memory unites them into a single squadron of rebellion.
The barras enter into non-aggression pacts every year on the anniversary of the military eoup. They are always present amidst the crowd that makes its way towards the main cemetery. Year after year, the march is led by a contingent of orphaned mothers wearing the pictures of their disappeared ehildren on their lapels. The police always disrupt the event, launehing tear-gas grenades into the crowd during the mareh or the eeremony inside the cemetery. In the face of sueh provocation, the two major barras join forces against the poliee. Inside the cemetamy, they form a human shield around the Monument to the Disappeared to protect the women and children from the inevitable police onshaught, always justified after the fact by claims of self-defense. Kids from the barras simply lahugh at these excuses, as they pummel hypoerisy with their rocks.
Raeial and ethnic discrimination is another factor that has detonated the rage of the barras . When images of the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles reached Saratiago, the barristas organized street demonstrations to protest the incident and the impunity given to the L.A. eops. In a similar gesture of solidarity, La Gtrra Blanca organized a demonstration when Mapuche communities were evicted from their lands by goverrime t and business interests in order to build a hydroelectric dam. They also helped organize the Festival of Mapuche Resistanee, a large-scale benefit concert which brought together rock and heavy nmetal bands from Chile and Argentina, uniting the thunder of amplified rock musie with the struggles of native peoples. Bands like A.N.I.M.A.L, Fisckales, Los Panteras Negras and Los Misemables were present, strumming their own tribal riff’s as Mapuche leader Aucán Huileamán spoke of past and present injustices. In these ways, the kids from the barras politicize their aggressions by creating allegiances with other minority struggles, placing their resentful hearts on the side of the victims of the neoliberal bulldozer.
Barra graffiti is the language of the sharnytown tribe, a mix of gothic signs with their rocker irriammar. Its inverted crosses and vowels-turnedarrows invoke both satanie and preeolumbian signs to create a language indecipherable by the cops on their trail. It is as if by inscribing the profane calligraphy of their graffiti on eity walls, the barristas are confronting the new edueational order of the free market-the classist policies of the private schools to which shantytown youth have no aecess. These inseriptions, with their hip lettering and intentional misspellings, are visible signs of these sharnytown stiffs whose police fhles were created long before they were born.
The affluent neighborhoods of Santiago shiver in fear every time dhere is a soccer game in the San Carlos de Apoquindo Stadium, home to) the Catholic University Soccer team, which is located in the city’s ritzy suburbs. A few days before these games, there is always an announcement about increased police protection for the houses of the rich. It is as if the announcement itself prefigures the all-out battle that inevitably takes place. And so it happens-kids appear on television being herded off to jail handcuffed, with their heads lowered. Those who escape arTest inflict their rage on the luxury cars, quaintly manicured gardens and other of toys of the upper class-that 1.8% of Chilean families who receive monthly incomes of over $15,000.
Then, and only then, the barristas return to their own neighborhoods-grooving to the sounds of their songs and reviving the popular melodies of yesteryear with new lyrics. The well known “Venceremos,” one of the hymns of the Popular Unity, echoes afresh in the bleachers of the National Stadium, once a concentration camp of dhe military regime. But dhe barras sing it without nostalgia, without the sad optimism of what Dow seems a wordy leftist harangue. They revive a melody that they themselves never sang-a melody they learned from clandestine tapes or the stories of relatives who were exiled or jailed after the military coup. In spite of the indictments of the national press, which accuses them of being lost souls, drug addicts, bums and drunks, the kids of the barras know where and when to pledge their allegiance. From the trenches of their curbside struggles, they evoke the fractured memory of the country into which they were born. In the punitive eye of the system, they are the black sheep who set a bad example for today’s success- oriented and conservative youth, those mesmerized by the year-round Christmas of the malls that line the Chilean Miami. The kids of the barras, those angels with holes in flheir shoes, are the human surplus that wipe the hypocritical smirk off the face of the victorious Chile of the miracle.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Pedro Lemebel is a writer and performance artist based in Santiago, Chile. He is the author of La esquina es mi corazón (Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1994) and El loco afán: Crónicas de uin sidario (Editorial LOM, 1996). His Perlas y Sicatrices is forthcoming from LOM. Translated from the Spanish by NACLA.
NOTES:
1. In their graffiti, La Garra Blanca spells “revolucionarios” with a “b” to make the word pun with “boludo,” which in thi . s context would mean obnoxious or stupid.
2. lnterview in Las Ultimas Noticias (Santiago), March 23, 1997.
3. Here the expression “reboluciandrio” is mixed with the word “albo,” meaning white, in reference to the color of the ColoColo jersey.
4. The hymn of Los de Abayo, to the tune of Venceremos, appears in PJgina Abieria (Santiago), February 2, 1992.
