The 1978 World Cup: How a military dictatorship turned a trophy into an alibi

Once upon a time a famous writer George Orwell said, "Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting".

I stated this quote To understand why the 1978 World Cup remains one of the most debated tournaments in football history, it is necessary to begin more than a decade before the opening match, when a decision made in London would become entwined with Argentina's political future.

A State of Terror and Fear

On 25 June 1978, Argentina's captain Daniel Passarella lifted the country's first World Cup after a 3-1 extra-time win over the Netherlands at River Plate's Estadio Monumental in Buenos Aires.

A packed stadium roared its approval.

Less than a mile away, inside a building the Navy called the Mechanics School, prisoners of the ruling military junta were held in secret cells where that same roar sometimes carried through the walls.

The two scenes were not unconnected.

Argentina's dictatorship saw the tournament as a way to convince the world, and itself, that the country was at peace. This is the story of how that happened, set out in the order it unfolded.

On 6 July 1966, Fifa's congress met in London and awarded the 1978 World Cup to Argentina.

The decision came only a week after General Juan Carlos Onganía had overthrown the elected government of Arturo Illia, one of six military takeovers Argentina endured in the twentieth century. The country Fifa had chosen was already sliding into more than a decade of unrest, as leftist guerrilla groups such as the Peronist Montoneros and the Marxist ERP fought security forces and right-wing paramilitaries in the streets.

Peronism was allowed back into politics in 1973, and Juan Perón's stand-in candidate, Héctor Cámpora, won the presidency that March.

Cámpora resigned in July to clear the way for the real homecoming, and on 20 June 1973 Perón returned after eighteen years in exile, a day marred by deadly clashes between rival Peronist factions at Ezeiza airport.

Perón won a special election that September and was sworn in on 12 October 1973 with his third wife, Isabel, as vice president. He died on 1 July 1974, making Isabel Perón the Western Hemisphere's first female head of state, and one who could not contain a country sliding further into violence, as right-wing death squads such as the Triple A and leftist guerrillas kept killing through 1975.

On 24 March 1976, the military stepped in again. A three-man junta took power, with General Jorge Rafael Videla representing the Army, Admiral Emilio Massera the Navy and Brigadier General Orlando Agosti the Air Force, though Videla served as president and public face of the regime.

The junta suspended Congress, banned unions and set up a network of clandestine detention centres, the most notorious being the Navy Mechanics School, known by its initials ESMA, in Buenos Aires. Human rights organisations put the number of people tortured, killed or disappeared without trace between 1976 and 1983 at up to thirty thousand.

Most were trade unionists, students, journalists and community organisers rather than armed militants.

In March 1977, on the first anniversary of the coup, the writer and journalist Rodolfo Walsh tried to warn the world in an open letter to the junta that catalogued the scale of the killing. He was shot dead on a Buenos Aires street the following day.

That same year, mothers of the disappeared began gathering every Thursday in the Plaza de Mayo to demand answers, a protest that continued through the World Cup and for decades afterward.

In December 1977, a Navy lieutenant named Alfredo Astiz infiltrated the group by posing as a relative of one of the disappeared, and a task force then abducted twelve of its members and supporters, including two French nuns, Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet. All were taken to ESMA, tortured for around ten days, then drugged and thrown alive from a military aircraft into the South Atlantic in what the Navy euphemistically called a transfer.

Blood, Propaganda and Football

"Football is never just football."- Simon Kuper

With the tournament less than two years away, the junta hired the American public relations firm Burson-Marsteller to help repair its image abroad, while the state poured an estimated seven hundred million dollars into new stadiums, airports, roads and Argentina's first colour television network.

Carlos Alberto Lacoste, a Navy officer close to Massera, ended up in charge of the organising committee after its first director, General Omar Actis, was assassinated in 1976 shortly after he questioned the spending.

Streets around the venues were cleared of informal settlements, and coach César Luis Menotti was barred from selecting most Argentine players based in Europe, leaving Valencia striker Mario Kempes as the only foreign-based member of the squad.

Opposition to the tournament grew loudest in France, where activists formed a committee to boycott the World Cup and gathered more than a hundred thousand signatures against French participation.

On 23 May 1978, days before the French squad flew to Buenos Aires, coach Michel Hidalgo was forced off a country road near Bordeaux by armed men who marched him into nearby woods. Hidalgo wrestled the gun away and escaped; police later found it was not loaded. A group calling itself Proletariat Left claimed the ambush was meant to protest French arms sales to the junta.

For thirty years, football believed Johan Cruyff had boycotted the tournament on principle. In 2008, he finally told Catalan radio the real reason: armed men had broken into his Barcelona home in 1977, and he described someone putting a rifle to his head while his wife and children were held nearby. Cruyff retired from international football that October and did not explain himself publicly until three decades later.

21 June 1978: The Match Against Peru That Still Raises Questions. Needing a four-goal margin over Peru to leapfrog Brazil on goal difference and reach the final, Argentina got a peculiar boost minutes before kick-off in Rosario, when Videla walked into the Peruvian dressing room accompanied by former United States secretary of state Henry Kissinger and read out a message of brotherhood from Peru's own military ruler, Francisco Morales Bermúdez. Kissinger's office later said he had no recollection of the visit.

Argentina won 6-0. Suspicion fell first on Peru's Argentine-born goalkeeper, Ramón Quiroga, and has never fully lifted since.

Reports at the time and afterward alleged that Argentina shipped thousands of tonnes of grain to Peru soon after the match and unfroze tens of millions of dollars in Peruvian assets.

Genaro Ledesma, a Peruvian trade unionist and later senator, went further, alleging that more than a dozen Peruvian political prisoners were quietly handed to the Argentine junta as part of the arrangement, a claim Morales Bermúdez always denied. No investigation has ever proven a fix, and several Peruvian and Argentine players have insisted they simply lost to the better side that night.

25 June 1978: A Trophy for the Generals as Argentina beat the Netherlands 3-1 after extra time in the final, with two goals from Mario Kempes and another from Daniel Bertoni securing the country's first World Cup title. Captain Daniel Passarella lifted the trophy before a packed Estadio Monumental, offering the military junta the triumphant image it had sought throughout the tournament.

At the closing banquet, a Dutch journalist, Frits Barend, slipped past security disguised as a player and confronted Videla directly about the disappeared, holding the dictator in an uncomfortable exchange for several minutes before guards pulled him away.

The Collapse and the Return to Democracy

By September 1979, international pressure had forced the junta to allow the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to visit and investigate the complaints piling up from relatives of the disappeared.

The same public relations operation that had helped sell the World Cup now printed the slogan Los argentinos somos derechos y humanos, roughly We Argentines are righteous and human, on a quarter of a million bumper stickers distributed across Buenos Aires.

Videla handed power to General Roberto Viola in March 1981.

Viola was pushed out that December by Leopoldo Galtieri, whose disastrous invasion of the Falkland Islands in April 1982 ended in defeat two months later and finished off what remained of the junta's authority.

Democratic elections in October 1983 brought Raúl Alfonsín to power, and two years later Videla was convicted, along with several other former commanders, at the Trial of the Juntas.

Videla was pardoned in 1990, then tried again once Argentina's courts reopened the case in the 2000s. He died in prison in May 2013, having been convicted of kidnapping, murder, torture and the theft of babies born to disappeared prisoners.

ESMA is now a public memorial and human rights museum.

Nearly five decades after Passarella lifted that trophy, Argentina still debates how to hold both memories at once: the joy of a first World Cup, and the horror that was unfolding a short walk away while the crowd celebrated.

Football, huh?