Last year, in the runup to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, we explored one of the many facets of how soccer and politics have been intertwined over the years. Despite all efforts from FIFA to prevent it, politics, both domestic and global, have more of an effect on soccer than in any other sport. There's simply too much civic and national pride at stake and too much of the world involved at every social level for politics not to pop up in multiple forms.
Take the case of Colombian club America de Cali.
For a long time, the Red Devils operated under that most malicious of sports tropes, the anti-title curse. (Us Chicago Cubs fans know a little about those.) Their curse came way back when the club decided to convert from amateur status to professionalism in 1948. Benjamin Urrea, a fan known as Garabato, was extremely disillusioned by this, to the point where he said that if America went pro, they would never be champion. That curse, it's widely believed, was broken in 1979, 31 years later, when America claimed its first league title.
Key phrase, widely believed. A funny thing about soccer is that 'being champion' has more than one meaning. Soccer doesn't work like most sports in North America. For teams in the NFL, NHL, NBA or MLB, victory really only means winning their respective league titles. In soccer, though, being champion can mean not only the league title, but also being champion of lower tiers of play, or champion of a knockout cup competition of some sort, or champion of a larger competition a club gains access to through quality performance in their league, or even champion of some random invitational tournament that pops up from time to time. It is this quirk of the sport that leads some America fans to believe the curse is still alive until such time as the club wins the South American continental competition, the Copa Libertadores.
Enter Bill Clinton.
On October 21, 1995, then-President Clinton signed Executive Order 12978. The order dealt with drug trafficking in Colombia, freezing the American assets of any entity connected with local drug cartels and preventing anyone that does business with American citizens from also doing business with those entities. This is otherwise known as the "Clinton List".
America de Cali was one of those entities. Two high-ranking members of the Cali drug cartel, Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, were America fans and used some of their drug money to support the club. Convicted in 1998 and placed into a Colombian prison that barely even slowed them down, their involvement landed the Red Devils on the Clinton List that same year along with any other business that involved the brothers.
In a way, the Curse of Garabato had manifested itself: if it couldn't prevent league titles, it could force the club to do without professionalism's benefits. Not only would no sponsor touch America, but they could no longer win prize money from any competition that involved American clubs. That came up in 1999, when the Red Devils won the Copa Merconorte, a competition involving American clubs, and missed out on $200,000.
With no way to make money other than gate receipts and merchandise sales, America's financial situation became dire. All they could afford to pay players was $3,000 a month, or $36,000 a year. There are not many quality soccer players that will take that kind of pay. In fact, you personally quite possibly make more than that yourself, even if you're not an athlete. The club's debt promptly ballooned, and as long as the Rodriguez brothers maintained control of the club, in fact as long as America de Cali remained a business in their current form, getting off the Clinton List was impossible.
Despite this, on the pitch, the Red Devils did surprisingly well. For one thing, they still exist as a soccer club. For another, they racked up five more league titles in 1997, 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2008 (the last two after Colombia converted to a split-season format known in Latin America as Apertura/Clausura). A more familiar way to illustrate different measures of success from team to team is the fact that America considers this a subpar showing.
In 2010, America finally escaped from the Clinton List by restructuring the club to be run by the city of Cali; the Rodriguez brothers had been extradited to the United States in 2004 and no longer had any control- Gilberto to Pennsylvania; Miguel to Kentucky. It just took several more years to wrestle control from the rest of the Rodriguez family. The Red Devils are free, but not without accruing $2 million in debt that they now have to try and pay off.
And while sports curses only hamper one club, the political world has no such restriction. For while America de Cali has freed itself of its drug-addled past, another Colombian club, Santa Fe, has found itself under suspicion of being financed by another trafficker, Bogota kingpin Daniel "El Loco" Barrera.
The Clinton List looms once more.
Showing posts with label colombia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label colombia. Show all posts
Monday, May 9, 2011
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Wiki Walk
You know what we haven't done in a long time? Pore through some Wikileaks diplomatic cables. Since everyone's kind of gotten bored with going through them every day and going 'hey, look at this' to every single thing, we're going to have to go to Wikileaks itself for the cables, which means the links that follow are not safe for military types.
The news organizations that don't have the entire stack of cables notwithstanding, so far 11,218 of the 251,287 cables have been released. That's 4.46% of the total.
That said, let's go browsing. Again, we're linking directly to the cables, so click with care.
First, let's just note the oldest cable in the group (for now), coming out of 1966. It comes out of Argentina, dealing with national jurisdictions in coastal waters. Argentine legislation under consideration at the time would claim territory six miles offshore, and 200 miles as "preferential". The Argentine navy claimed that it would soon be standard throughout the Western Hemisphere. (The 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea set a maximum of 12 miles where a country can exert total control, a further 12 miles for more limited control, and an exclusive economic zone of 200 miles, which gives a country the rights to resources but doesn't let them restrict access. So Argentina wasn't too far off.)
The second-oldest is from February 1972, dealing with the sale of F-4E fighter jets to Iran. Ah, Cold War. How morally ambiguous you made us.
A psychological profile of Iranians in general made in 1979, written by one Victor Tomseth, isn't overly flattering. As you'd think back then. It was leaked way back in November, but it's the first you've likely heard of it. The first sentence of the profile is "PERHAPS THE SINGLE DOMINANT ASPECT OF THE PERSIAN PSYCHE IS AN OVERRIDING EGOISM." It goes on like this.
One of today's leaks comes out of Colombia, where in December 2007, president Alvaro Uribe agreed to an "encounter zone" in which to retrieve hostages taken by the paramilitary group FARC that at the time included Ingrid Betancourt. More surprising is the $100 million (US) set aside in a fund as an incentive for FARC members to release hostages and leave the group. In another cable released today, Uribe, during the visit of an American delegation led by Harry Reid, Uribe compared the threat Hugo Chavez posed to Latin America to the threat Hitler posed to Europe.
In a cable from April 2004, Panama's Supreme Court voted 8-1 that it lacked jurisdiction to prosecute Israeli arms smuggler Shimon Yalin Yelinek in the transfer of arms from Nicaragua to Colombia, despite the fact that he was living in Panama, that he was alleged with falsifying Panamanian National Police documents, and that they had used a boat registered to Panama. The cable notes charges that all eight majority judges received bribes to vote the way they did. At the time of the cable, Yelinek was also under investigation by America's DEA on money-laundering accusations. (Yelinek is at large to this day, supplying support to the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico's drug war.)
In a cable from June 2006, Ban Ki-Moon, in his days prior to becoming Secretary-General of the United Nations, offered congratulations for the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. That's about all there is to that cable, but that's all one really needs to wonder if that's something becoming of a guy who'd go on to be put in charge of an organization dedicated to world peace.
A cable from January 2003 shows that supposed illegal immigrants from Pakistan within the United States, persecuted by anti-Arab attitudes in a post-9/11 America, and fearful of deportation back to Pakistan if they made themselves known in any way to the INS, re-defected to Canada to seek political asylum. The cable makes no mention of how those requests turned out.
And let's finish out with a February 2008 cable from the consulate in Kolkata, India, mentioning that in 2007, it rejected about 60% of applications for religious worker visas. Why? The applicants weren't actually religious workers. In some cases, the problem was as simple as being a maintenance guy who wasn't partaking in any actual religious duties at their place of worship, or not living within the consulate's jurisdiction. In other cases, though, people went so far as to make up a place of worship so they could claim it to the consulate. Not only didn't it work, but they'll likely have some interesting questions to answer once they meet whoever's in charge of them metaphysically.
The news organizations that don't have the entire stack of cables notwithstanding, so far 11,218 of the 251,287 cables have been released. That's 4.46% of the total.
That said, let's go browsing. Again, we're linking directly to the cables, so click with care.
First, let's just note the oldest cable in the group (for now), coming out of 1966. It comes out of Argentina, dealing with national jurisdictions in coastal waters. Argentine legislation under consideration at the time would claim territory six miles offshore, and 200 miles as "preferential". The Argentine navy claimed that it would soon be standard throughout the Western Hemisphere. (The 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea set a maximum of 12 miles where a country can exert total control, a further 12 miles for more limited control, and an exclusive economic zone of 200 miles, which gives a country the rights to resources but doesn't let them restrict access. So Argentina wasn't too far off.)
The second-oldest is from February 1972, dealing with the sale of F-4E fighter jets to Iran. Ah, Cold War. How morally ambiguous you made us.
A psychological profile of Iranians in general made in 1979, written by one Victor Tomseth, isn't overly flattering. As you'd think back then. It was leaked way back in November, but it's the first you've likely heard of it. The first sentence of the profile is "PERHAPS THE SINGLE DOMINANT ASPECT OF THE PERSIAN PSYCHE IS AN OVERRIDING EGOISM." It goes on like this.
One of today's leaks comes out of Colombia, where in December 2007, president Alvaro Uribe agreed to an "encounter zone" in which to retrieve hostages taken by the paramilitary group FARC that at the time included Ingrid Betancourt. More surprising is the $100 million (US) set aside in a fund as an incentive for FARC members to release hostages and leave the group. In another cable released today, Uribe, during the visit of an American delegation led by Harry Reid, Uribe compared the threat Hugo Chavez posed to Latin America to the threat Hitler posed to Europe.
In a cable from April 2004, Panama's Supreme Court voted 8-1 that it lacked jurisdiction to prosecute Israeli arms smuggler Shimon Yalin Yelinek in the transfer of arms from Nicaragua to Colombia, despite the fact that he was living in Panama, that he was alleged with falsifying Panamanian National Police documents, and that they had used a boat registered to Panama. The cable notes charges that all eight majority judges received bribes to vote the way they did. At the time of the cable, Yelinek was also under investigation by America's DEA on money-laundering accusations. (Yelinek is at large to this day, supplying support to the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico's drug war.)
In a cable from June 2006, Ban Ki-Moon, in his days prior to becoming Secretary-General of the United Nations, offered congratulations for the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. That's about all there is to that cable, but that's all one really needs to wonder if that's something becoming of a guy who'd go on to be put in charge of an organization dedicated to world peace.
A cable from January 2003 shows that supposed illegal immigrants from Pakistan within the United States, persecuted by anti-Arab attitudes in a post-9/11 America, and fearful of deportation back to Pakistan if they made themselves known in any way to the INS, re-defected to Canada to seek political asylum. The cable makes no mention of how those requests turned out.
And let's finish out with a February 2008 cable from the consulate in Kolkata, India, mentioning that in 2007, it rejected about 60% of applications for religious worker visas. Why? The applicants weren't actually religious workers. In some cases, the problem was as simple as being a maintenance guy who wasn't partaking in any actual religious duties at their place of worship, or not living within the consulate's jurisdiction. In other cases, though, people went so far as to make up a place of worship so they could claim it to the consulate. Not only didn't it work, but they'll likely have some interesting questions to answer once they meet whoever's in charge of them metaphysically.
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