In mixing soccer and politics, score one for Argentine government
President gets a lift by ensuring free TV broadcasts for all
The opening minutes of the soccer game brought a quick goal, and Rubén Bres and the 15 guests who had joined him around his battered TV erupted in cheers. But they were happy not just for their team. They were happy they could even watch.
Until this season, Argentina's ardent soccer fans needed cable to see premier league games on TV and pay-per-view. Then, in a move analysts call shrewdly populist, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's government helped push Argentina's soccer association to sever its long-term contract with the country's biggest media group and broadcast free all games on a state-run station.
Now, about 20 million Argentines -- half the population -- watch top matches, more than four times as many as last season.
"When I saw the news on TV, I knew what it meant -- football was coming into my home," said Bres, 37, whose small cinder-block house is blocks from where Diego Maradona, coach of the Argentine national team and once one of the country's greatest stars, grew up. "Politically, it was very intelligent. She's going to get our vote."
The deal with the Argentine Football Association gave a lift to a government whose popularity had plummeted since 2008, as Argentines turned against Fernández de Kirchner's economic policies. In June, her ruling coalition lost its majority in congressional elections. Her husband, Néstor Kirchner, who preceded her as president and still exerts immense influence over government policy, was trounced in his bid for a seat in the lower house.
The couple felt that their 2011 presidential ambitions were in jeopardy. But soccer, long intertwined with politics here, presented them with an opportunity, said Carlos Fara, a Buenos Aires pollster.
By sealing the broadcast deal, Fara said, Fernández de Kirchner hoped not just to recoup some of her popularity but also to strike a blow against the Clarin Group newspaper and cable TV company, which held the broadcasting rights until the soccer season opened in August. The Clarin newspaper has reported aggressively on government corruption; the Kirchners accuse it of bias and say its coverage contributed to their electoral losses.
Obviously, they were the clear winners," Fara said of the Kirchners, "because they took from Grupo Clarin a business that was important to them."
A poll that Fara's firm conducted in September in metropolitan Buenos Aires showed that 54 percent of respondents approved of the broadcast deal, with 40 percent disapproving. Fara, though, says the president's approval rating stayed around 30 percent.
The state is paying the soccer association $155 million a year to televise the games, giving the sport a much-needed infusion of cash. Many soccer teams here are near bankruptcy, and most depend on young players and aging veterans because the most talented stars play in Europe, said Victor Hugo Morales, a prominent radio soccer commentator.
"To get out of this fix is going to take a minimum of four or five years," Morales said.
The government's deal with the soccer federation came after Fernández de Kirchner's chief of staff told soccer's power broker, Jorge Grondona, that "the state would be interested in a deal," recounted Ernesto Cherquis, spokesman for the league. When Grondona was rebuffed in his effort to double the $70 million a Clarin partner was paying to televise games, he unilaterally broke the contract and sealed a deal with the government, Cherquis said in an interview.
"The numbers were where we wanted them," Cherquis said.
Meanwhile, Fernández de Kirchner has cast the deal as a "giant step in the democratization of Argentine society." In a nationally televised speech in August, she likened the Clarin Group to the military junta that ruled Argentina until 1983.
"Only those who paid could watch a game of soccer, because they kidnapped the goals," she said of the group, using language that recalled the disappearances of thousands during the dictatorship. "I do not want any more kidnappings. I want a free society."
The rhetoric drew editorial rebukes from the capital's major dailies. Pundits also said that with poverty climbing, the soccer deal amounted to government misspending.
"The royal court says the whole country can see football for free," Jorge Lanata, a journalist and a critic of the Kirchners, said recently on his TV show. "Why don't we democratize the access to food? Isn't that more important than football?"
Critics also question the government's motives in cobbling together a media reform law, approved by Congress in October, that requires firms such as the Clarin Group to sell or restructure their interests in cable, TV and radio. Fernández de Kirchner has said repeatedly that the law breaks up monopolies and ensures freedom of expression.
Among the president's backers is Morales, the radio commentator. On a recent Friday night at Radio Continental's studio, he told listeners that the Clarin Group had too much power and that the Argentine Football Association was being shamefully underpaid.
"Now business is good for the clubs, which are receiving double what they were getting paid, and good for the people who are watching," he said.
On a recent Saturday, as venerable teams Racing Club and Argentinos Juniors played, few seemed happier with the new arrangement than the residents of the barrio of Villa Fiorito, with its dusty cinder-block houses, concrete patios where children play soccer and, of course, Maradona's dilapidated childhood home.
Six days a week, Bres scavenges recyclables from garbage in elegant districts. On this day, though, he had loaded his rickety dinner table with beer, cheese and salami, and had turned up the TV.
"I'm going to be thankful for this all my life," he said, "because football has been brought into my home and the homes of my neighbors."
wow!! sad to say but it´s quite probably is bread and circus... difficult to try to be objective in my caso though , because I don´t enjoy playing or watching (at least consciously! ) sports including fútbol, so it´s difficult my kind of circus (sure there are others!). Pretty weird here too. We are a Corporacy.Professor CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS (Anthropologist): (Through Translator) There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world on which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like.
BROWNING: Despite his pessimism for the future, Levi-Strauss' legacy remains his optimism about what diverse cultures can learn from one another.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =120066035
Well at least the war in Iraq is over. I have not seen anything on the front page of my local newspaer about it for weeks.The birth of a nation of sheep
The deep deep sleep of the booboisie
The underground wave of feel-good fascism
The uneasy rule of the super-rich
The total triumph of imperial America
The final proof of our Manifest Destiny
The first loud cry of America über alles
Echoing in freedom's alleys
The last lament for lost democracy
The total triumph of
totalitarian plutocracy
Ferlinghetti
http://www.counterpunch.org/ferlinghetti05062004.html
). Interesting quotation, maybe I´ll eat Bosch oranges in his memory! And gracias for Ferlinghetti poem! 
not necessary the triplication, I can read quite well the three idiomas... Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 4 guests
