See No Evil

In this episode, you’ll hear how the Lords of Soccer abused their positions to prop up and promote a violent dictatorship in Chile, all in the name of profit.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Santiago is the Stadio Nacional. It's normally a cauldron of sound,
a NonStop, throbbing sea of red as Chileans cheer on
their national team La Roja. When the Chilean national team
is playing. I mean, it could be a World Cup match,
it could be a Cope America match, it could be

(00:24):
a friendly, an exhibition, and it is like a national holiday,
a World Cup qualifying match in a soccer mad country
like Chile. But even the most festive holidays to shame, wild, emotional,
full of anxious anticipation. So you would have expected a
Studio Nacional to be erupting this November day in at

(00:47):
stake for Chile a final spot in the upcoming FIFA
World Cup. But the stadium was practically empty. It's wooden benches, barren.
The utter absence of fans of voices was a testament
to the absurdity of the situation that was unfolding. Samuel

(01:09):
Galvez remembers watching the game at home on a black
and white TV that was unbelievable. Was supposed to be
the stadium full of people, but nothing like that happened,
Nothing like that happened. Oh my goodness, Dressed in their
traditional red tops and royal blue shorts, the eleven members

(01:30):
of Laroja were ready to go. They lined up at
the center of the field. The Chilean national anthem blared
over the speaker system. The players seemed relaxed, confidently waving
to the few thousand supporters that had turned out. It
was a perfect South American summer day for soccer. The

(01:51):
only thing missing the other team, the eleven players from
the Soviet Union. We're nowhere to be seen. Now. You
might think you need an opposing team to play a
World Cup qualifying match FIFA in ninety three, It turns
out did not so. In the referee blew his whistle.

(02:12):
The Chilean team made nine passes. None were particularly crisp
or under control. The Chilean squad looked like a group
of friends at a park. If you watch the video,
you can almost see them giggling at the bizarre kabuki
theater they were acting out as they casually worked the
ball across midfield and deep into their opponent's territory. The

(02:36):
Chilean captain, Francisco Valdez, ever so calmly kicks the ball
into the unguarded net Just thirty seconds after the opening kickoff,
the referee blew his whistle and called the match. The
game was over. The scoreboard made it official. Chile one

(02:58):
the Soviet Union nil for the first time in nearly
a decade. La Roja was heading back to the World Cup. Yea,
I've never seen anything like that since. You know, a
team have to score a goal without the opponents on
the pitch, and that's how it ended. And this, you know,

(03:19):
weirdest forfeit ever. Chilean American John Gonzalez says the absurdity
of the match is etched in his mind when we
talk about the situation with the Soviet Union. That was
a political event, that was something that was beyond the sport.
Chile's military dictator, General Augusto Pinochet was no doubt celebrating

(03:41):
his brutal regime had dodged the bullet all thanks to
the lords of soccer. To understand what led to this
empty net goal, this force of a World Cup qualifying match,
and why FIFA pimped out one of its games to
prop up a violent authoritarian regime, you have to go
back a few years before sports and global politics met

(04:04):
on the pitch in Santiago. I'm Connor Powell. This is
episode seven, Seeing No Evil. On this faithful September morning,
the buses in Santiago were more crowded than usual. The

(04:24):
passengers were in a foul mood, nudging and pushing each
other for a little extra space. Some even hitched the
ride on the outside, standing on the buses bumper comfort
at the expense of safety. A nationwide strike had been
called in the summer of three by truckers, taxi drivers,
and middle class shopkeepers. The transportation system was paralyzed, the

(04:48):
economy was a wreck. Chileans were fed up and frustrated.
The country was broke. No food, no mail, no nothing.
That's Samuel Galvez, an American Spanish language radio host who
grew up in Chile as a teenager. He remembers his
homeland as a stable, middle class country, and yes, they

(05:12):
were passionate about soccer. Chili had its problems, of course.
Outside the capital Santiago, the country was poor and what
wealth there was was distributed unevenly. But it wasn't an
economic basket case or political tinder box either, but it
had become one by v three with a little outside help.

(05:33):
The strike causing The traffic on this particular September morning
was aimed squarely the Socialist government of President Salvador Allende.
The Doctor Agende was a very nice politician, but west
nice when he was in the opposition. When he took
the power, that was a mess, absolutely a mess. Allende

(05:58):
had been elected three years early on a promise to
redistribute wealth more fairly. The Soviet Union had sensed a
new potential ally in the Americas, they made overtures, and
almost overnight Moscow and Washington opened a new fronts in
their Cold War. But Allende's agenda was struggling. You cannot

(06:18):
buy uh, cigarettes, bread, moder anything except if you have
the ration card. That's that was very difficult. To tackle inequality,
Allende created new food and health programs for the poor,
similar to the ones launched by his good friend Fidel
Castro in Cuba. Allende expanded a plan to redistribute land

(06:43):
to rural families and a nationalized key industries like copper
mining and banking. These sectors had long been dominated by
American and European companies, and these masters of industry seethed
at Allende's audacity. They warned that the Marxists would soon
control not just Chile but all of South America. Allende

(07:12):
is really screwing us. Now, that's US President Richard Nixon.
He and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger saw pretty
much everything that was an American style capitalism as a
warning sign of creeping communism. The Soviets, they feared, were
always lurking around the corner. If Allende should win the

(07:33):
election in Chile and then you have Castro in Cuba,
what you will in effect have in Latin America is
a red sandwich, and eventually it'll all be read. Kissinger
urged Nixon to move against Allende. I would go to
a confrontation. According to historian Brenda Elsie, Nixon took the

(07:59):
advice the United States government, particularly Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon,
immediately start to plan a coup attempt. The CIA began
funneling millions of dollars to Chilean opposition groups, encouraging strikes
to destabilize the country. Nixon vowed to make the Chilean economy,

(08:19):
in his own words, scream by the morning of September eleven,
seventy three. That faithful September morning, most of Chile was
in a foul mood, and like the passengers crammed into
those overflowing buses, their elbows were growing sharp. And that's
when had happened. And then on September eleventh, nine three,

(08:42):
there's a bombardment of the presidential Palace. La Moneda Air
Force planes flew low over the presidential Palace and dropped
their bombs with deadly accuracy. In the early hours of
September eleven, the Chilean military had seized control of the

(09:03):
TV and radio stations throughout the country. The general's demanded
Allende resign. The socialist president's economic policies had been shredded,
in part by a not so covert Cia campaign, but
even after the bombs dropped, he refused to hand over
power as tanks and soldiers supporting the military coup took

(09:25):
control of the streets of Santiago. I end A made
one last radio address, long long lived, the people, long
moved the workers. On my last words, Salvadora Yende talks
about the tragedy of democracy being destroyed, that he still

(09:49):
has faith in workers in the working class. By four pm,
the streets of Santiago were quiet. Soldiers controlled all the
key spots the mill. Harry was now in charge Presidential palace.
Bomb that day continued to burn. The pungent smell of
the day's violence, burnt carbon and metallic sulfur. You know

(10:11):
what if you've smelled it lingered over the city. Then
came the news and SALVADORI and dies. A witness claims
he took his own life with an a K forty
seven given to him by Fidel Castro, but no one
really knows. As quick and violent as the coup had been,

(10:32):
its brutality was nothing compared to what was about to happen.
In the days following the coup, soldiers rounded up thousands
of Chileans, workers, students, politicians, and artists who were arrested

(10:54):
and imprisoned. In the fall of it was dangerous to
be a supporter of Salvador, and military death squads roamed
the country. Chileans were arrested in mass imprisoned, killed in Santiago.
Bodies floated in the currents of the Mapocho River each morning,

(11:17):
victims of killings. The night before, the US race to
recognize the new ruling military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet,
Samuel Galvez remembers the confusion and horror each day brought,
and the desperation people felt trying to stay alive. Suspicion

(11:38):
was everywhere. Chileans were forced to whisper to each other,
hoping to clean any shred of information about a missing
neighbor or family member. Hey, do you know that guy
who used to leave at that corner? The Secret Service
came and took it, and we don't know what's going on.
That's the issue. The main issue among the many who

(12:00):
were arrested in the days after September eleven was the
famous Chilean folk singer Victor Horror. His hands were smashed,
his interrogators mocked him. They demanded he played the guitar
with his mangled fingers. Horra defiant until the end, instead
sang a Chilean protest song at the top of his
longest Horror's body, riddled with bullet wounds, was dumped and

(12:33):
displayed outside of sports arena stadiums throughout the country, overflowed
with prisoners, their lights always on, the screams piercing the
US back regime. They didn't even try to hide what
was happening, The military government in Chile said today it
executed six so called extremists over the weekend and promised

(12:56):
the same fate for others, and thousands of people out
of favor with the new regime are being held prisoner
in the stadium. That stadium, a Stadio Nacionale, home to Laroja,
was packed with so called subversives. There, the military junta
tortured and killed anyone deemed to be an enemy of
the state. Even Chile's famous soccer players went into hiding,

(13:20):
afraid their long hair and mustaches would brand them as radicals.
Leonardo Valley's, one of Laroja's captains, spent days trying to
track down an uncle who had been taken to the stadium,
while the team's doctor, Alfonso Reis, was brutally tortured for
his Communist beliefs. Hugo Lepe, a retired player and leader

(13:41):
of an important soccer union, disappeared. Other players, like Carlos Kazili,
would spend months trying to free family members. Foreigners were
also rounded up. Among the thousands taken to the stadium,
two british Men, Richard Barber and Adrian Jansen. Brutality. You
could see people kneeling. Long row of people kneeling with

(14:05):
the legs widespread, with their hands hype out their heads.
One of these men or three of these men were collapsing.
As they collapsed, they were beaten or kicked or trampled
onto to get them up again. In the west, example
I saw was about eight men coming in one by
one to urinate, and after that they were gunned by
it very heavily, into the back, into the shoulders and
into the stomach and ribs by carabineros. We saw one

(14:27):
of these men next day in the cell. They seemed
to have been very heavily worked over. Barbara and Jansen
were released shortly after the queue, traumatized but alive after
more than a century. Chilean democracy was far less fortunate
with American help, Marxism had been defeated there, but so

(14:48):
had democracy In Chile. Democracy had become a casualty of
the Cold War between the Eagle and the Bear. As
the world watched the violence and a once vibrant democracy crumbled,
Chile's national soccer team, Laroja, was preparing for one of
its most important matches in decades. In a twist of fate,

(15:12):
Laroja was set to play the Soviet Union No. Longer
a friend and now a political foe. Their match with
the side the final spot in the FIFA World Cup,
But after seeing the carnage across Chile, the Sylviets threatened
to boycott the game, demanding FIFA move the match away

(15:32):
from the stadium that was still dripping with blood. Why
didn't FIFA listen? The answer to that question is a
stain on the organization, as the lords of soccer cast
their lot with Pinochet, giving the dictator the one thing
he wanted most of all. The Nationalist Stadium is a

(16:00):
horrific place to be. The prisoners. You can see some
of them on the bleachers, blood, urine, and God only
knows what else, staying the walls and floors, moaning, crying.
The crackling sound of electricity echoed down the long corridors

(16:21):
until it was drowned out by the screams ere a
piercing the sounds someone makes when they're hit again and
again and again with fifteen thousand volts from a cattle prod.
The lights and the makeshift prison cells were always on,
so too were the lights in the stadium. With their

(16:42):
hands tied behind their backs, the prisoners sat there day
and night, listening to the sounds of torture from the
benches they once sat in to cheer on Chile's national
soccer team. The prisoners being held in a Stadio Nacionale
were accustomed to seeing soldiers in their crisp green uniforms

(17:05):
with a little black patch on their left chest declaring
Army of Chile and the rifles the prisoners knew all
too well with the strike from the butt of a rifle.
Felt like they were also familiar with the journalists who
were regularly paraded through the makeshift prison. But who were
these men? What were they doing inspecting the grass pitch.

(17:27):
A few prisoners tried to call out from underneath the bleachers, udonos, udonos.
They pleaded for help. The well dressed soccer officials didn't
stay long and left without making eye contact. The men
were a small group of FIFA officials who had traveled
to Chile to inspect the pitch at a Stadio Nacional.
The fierce international debate about the final World Cup qualifying

(17:51):
match between Chile and the Soviet Union had been raging
for weeks. Here again, Brenda Elsie Soviet's refused to play
in the stadium citing all of the reasons. Our comrades
have just been tortured and killed in the stadium. We
do not want to legitimize this government, and they refused
to play it. Reports of the torture and abuse have

(18:14):
been circulating in Western press and amongst soccer officials for weeks.
Italian powerhouse inter Milan had even canceled a friendly match
with Chile because of the violence. FIFA saw what was
happening and went ahead anyways. Elsie was granted access to
FIFA's archives for her own research. FIFA knows what's going on.

(18:36):
They are getting dozens of letters every day from different
people within football organizations, from club members, from citizens, from
people that were in exile throughout Europe, throughout the world,
writing to FIFA to say, please don't legitimize this government,
Please don't play this match. Legitimacy is exactly what the

(19:00):
military junta craved. Recognition from the Green Gooes in Washington
and London wasn't enough. Pinochet wanted no, he needed global
respect and who better than the lords of soccer, the
captains of the World Cup to bless his new regime.
He sends the team with a letter to go to

(19:20):
the nineteen four World Cup to Basically, the letter's intention
is to assure everyone that things are wonderful and peaceful
in Chile and that they're open for business. FIFA's then president,
Stanley Rouse might have believed soccer could be pure, free
of world politics, a sanctuary from the Cold War, but
there was no avoiding the brutality of the Pinochet regime.

(19:44):
To play a match in Santiago in a Stadio nacional
would be to ignore the violence of the coup to
sanction it. The Soviets, no strangers to political violence themselves,
offered FIFA a way out. They requested the game we
moved to a neutral country. This surprised and irritated Rouse,
FIFA around the World Cup, not its member nations, and

(20:07):
certainly not the Communists over in Moscow. Privately, many European
countries also argued the match should be moved. Rouse relented,
but only a bit. In the days before the match
was set to kick off, Rouse promised to send a
delegation to Santiago to investigate the claims that a Stadio

(20:28):
nacional was unfit to host a World Cup qualifier. This
is the same Stanley Rouse who investigated the South African
apartheid regime and concluded it wasn't racist those guys inspecting
the grass pitch the FIFA officials prisoners called out to
these were those guys. Here's British soccer writers to Horsefield

(20:49):
and historian Brenda Elsie to explain with those officials, Saul
and ignored. The delegation are actually made to wait two
days by the Chilean all thorities while they well, while
they clear out the stadium for the FIFA visit. They
clear out the stadium literally, have to pose the blood

(21:11):
off of the walls and other human excrement and everything else.
With most of the prisoners relocated to another torture site.
The few that remain were held at gunpoint and after
crying out, ordered to stay quiet. The FIFA visit takes
place while there's dissidents down in the bowels of the

(21:31):
changing rooms, right of the bowels of the stadium. FIFA
look at the pitch, they look at the stands and
not as much as they do, and they see nothing.
There's political prisoners who are about probably gonna lose their lives,
probably not a hundred yards away, but it's because it's
not looked for or because they don't want to look
for it. It's not seen, it's not communicated by FIFA's

(21:54):
inspection lasted less than twenty minutes. Somehow they didn't notice
what was happening, or they didn't care, and they declared
the Stadio Nacional fit for competition. So FIFA since a
communicate back to Stanley Rouse, everything's okay, the game should
go ahead. It lands at the feet of a particular
delegate named Renee Court. His quotation at that time was,

(22:20):
when asked about Chile, was quote, we are not concerned
with politics or what regimes are ruling a country. End
of quote. Rouse issued an ultimatum to the Soviet Union
play or forfeit. How could they defy him? Nobody walks
away from a spot in the World Cup, And as

(22:42):
is so often the case in such matters, FIFA claimed
to be above politics, not to be taken sides, But
in the issuing of that ultimatum, it took the side
of a ruthless dictator. Even they still refuse to accept
the politics has a part to play, and they mandate

(23:04):
that the game goes ahead. But the Soviet Union don't
travel Moscow said, no, I know, you don't want to
give too many, perhaps to the Soviet Union in this
period when it is itself committing crimes and human rights abuses.
But this decision is a good one, it's the right one,
and they withdraw. But FIFA to create, a game must

(23:26):
be played, a goal must be scored, as if the
history books could somehow be deceived, and the torture chambers
just a race. Once the game goes ahead and there's
a scoreline. Technically it's a footnote in the World Cup
qualifying campaign. It's not a result that needs explaining with
an asterix. It's a It's a football result, and that's

(23:49):
how FIFA wanted their game to be, and the qualifying
nature of the World Cup to be. At the end
of the day, FIFA, by refusing to take sides, had
given Pinochet its blessing and that's all he really ever wanted.

(24:12):
Section eight. At a Stadio Nacional, the warped wooden benches
stand out like a battered ship and a sea of
red modern seats. A rusted out metal fence surrounds them.
It almost looks like it could fall at any minute.
At first glance, Section eight seems so out of place.
Did they run out of money while they were doing construction.

(24:34):
Did they forget to finish the job. But it isn't
a mistake. They sat in those benches, the sons, the daughters,
the brothers, the sisters, mothers and fathers who were held prisoner,
tortured and murdered in a Stadio National in the fall

(24:56):
of Chileans have never forgotten what took place there, and
they've never forgotten the game FIFA made them play. It's
something that really not just that match, but that era
is kind of left out a conversation many of times.
Here again, journalist John Gonzalez. There's such a passion of

(25:19):
soccer in my family, but I can be honest, I've
never heard anyone discussed that match. It's hurtful, and I
really anytime I talked to a Chilean about it, whether
it be a family member or a friend, you can
tell that it's definitely something. I don't know if embarrassment
is the right word, but I guess shame. There's a
lot of shame around that incident today. No matter how exciting,

(25:44):
no matter how amped up a crowd is for a game,
that hunting monument, those warped wooden benches behind the North
Goal are there always there, the ghosts that never leave
Chilean's don't have to speak of the horrors to remember them.
That is really a stain, it's a black eye. And
I think it's because that incident was beyond soccer. And

(26:10):
while FIFA would like the world to forget its involvement,
its decision, it's ultimatum. Samuel Galvez says, the pain can't
be erased. What can I say it try to forget
the circumstances. It's like somebody kill your mother and say, uh,

(26:31):
forget it. When it comes to FIFA's pardon this. Maybe
it's fair to pin this all on Stanley Rouse, a
British colonialists who saw the world through the eyes of
white Victorian privilege. But five years later, FIFA faced a
similar dilemma, another moral test of what it means to
promote the beautiful game to an eager world, and that

(26:54):
decision made in Argentina wasn't made by Rouse. FIFA I
had a chance to do better and it absolutely failed.
That's coming up next on the Lords of Soccer. The
Lords of Soccer Al FIFA stole the Beautiful Game is

(27:17):
an Inside Voices media production in conjunction with I Heart Radio.
The series was written and executive produced by Gary Scott
and me Connor Powell. Special thanks to gizli Rossi for
helping me with the trickiest of the Brazilian names. If
I screwed up, It's on me, not her Logan he
Tell and Katie mcmurrn provided the sound design with assistance

(27:39):
from j. C. Swaddick and Jake Blue Note. Alec Cowen
is our associate producer and Jeffrey Katz was our story editor.
Our fact checker is Alexa O'Brien and thanks to Miles Gray,
who produced the series for I Heart Radio. If you
have any comments or questions, please reach out. You can
find us on Twitter. I'm at Connor m Powell and

(28:02):
Gary is at Gary Robert Scott and if you have
any stories about FIFA, let us know. If you like
what you hear, please give us a shout out at
the hashtag Lords of Soccer