No other sport was so brutally hit by the cycle of political
violence that swept Argentina in the 1970s as was rugby. The
recollections of relatives and teammates of the players and the
testimonies gathered in the trials against members of the security
forces involved in their illegal kidnapping, torture, murder and
burial in unmarked graves or dropped alive into the River Plate,
made it possible to reconstruct a political climate and similar
personal trajectories. In all the cases in which it was possible to
piece together the brief trajectories of the young men, a few
common traits stand out. First, the overwhelming majority grew up
in middle and upper-middle class families with strong Catholic
convictions. Second, a large majority was educated in state-run
schools, and the public university, which became the main locus of
political socialization. Many of them showed from an early age a
strong inclination towards fighting against injustice, an attitude
strengthened during the university years. All of them, without
exception, were active in revolutionary organizations, be they
left-populist (Peronist) or Marxist. Some joined these groups when
they were still in high school; others "proletarianized"
themselves, learning trades at evening training schools and
becoming factory workers. A few acted as union delegates in
hospitals and factories while another minority took up the armed
struggle with the guerrillas. Their names are also a sample of the
migratory contribution that forged modern Argentina. They had
Spanish, Italian, English, German, French, Japanese, Armenian and
Jewish backgrounds.
The disappeared rugbiers started playing as children or
teenagers at schools or in clubs, most of them giving it up once
they started university. A few continued to play until the end,
sometimes even as they were in the underground. With twenty
disappeared rugbiers, LPRC was the club hardest hit by state
terrorism. Its rugbiers formed a compact group. Sixteen of them
studied at the National University of La Plata, one of the
country's largest and most prestigious institutions of higher
learning. They studied law, anthropology, architecture,
architecture, journalism, history and medicine. They were all
activists in far-left political and military organizations. In the
early 1970s the city of La Plata and its university became a
sounding board for the revolutionary expectations that had been
growing since the previous decade. It was there that the violent
response against this climate was most brutal. With one victim
every 613 inhabitants, the capital of Buenos Aires province was the
city hardest hit by right-wing extremism and state terrorism. La
Plata was also the city with the highest number of concentration
camps in relation to the number of inhabitants: one every 18,559.
The all-out hunting of left-wing student and union activists began
in the spring of 1973 and went on unabated until the end of the
decade. By the end of the dictatorship in 1983 paramilitary death
squads and security forces had murdered eight hundred students,
faculty and staff.
What did it mean to be a revolutionary activist and a rugby
player, sometimes both at the same time? The issue was raised in
many a discussion since everyone, including politicized rugbiers,
were well aware of the apparent contradiction between embracing
radical ideas and practicing what was considered an "elite" sport.
Although since World War Two rugby was in its way to becoming a
middle-class sport, the sport's original link with the British
expatriate community and the Argentine Rugby Union's (UAR) elitist
rhetoric of hard-core amateurism did much to feed and reinforce the
popular perception that viewed rugby, in the words of a journalist,
"an island within Argentine sport". The most recent proof of that
came in early 1973, when the International Rugby Board (IRB)
cancelled the Englanad XV tour to Argentina after some of its
players and officials received letters with threats from the
guerrilla organization Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (FAR,
Revolutionary Armed Forces). The purpose of the threats, a member
of the organization told a journalist, was to force the English
players "to stay at home" because rugby was a sport of "oligarchs"
played "mostly by foreigners". The timing of the English tour,
which had been planned several years earlier, was not the ideal
one, to say the least. Since the late 1960s Argentina underwent a
process of political radicalization that led to the collapse of the
military government and the election of a left-wing Peronist
candidate in May 1973. This regime change took place in a heated
climate of anti-imperialist actions that targeted U.S. and British
interests. It was in this context that the British Foreign Service
and its Embassy in Buenos Aires advised the IRB not to go ahead
with the tour. The last-minute announcement of the cancellation of
the tour triggered a bitter conflict with the UAR since it
jeopardized the highlight of the rugby season and thus wreaked
havoc on its finances. To make matters worse, the English team
accepted an invitation to play in New Zealand, thus giving credit
to the Argentines' belief that their expected guests had been
"bought off" by the New Zealanders. Having failed to convince
London to reconsider its decision UAR retaliated by forbidding any
of its affiliated clubs from playing in England.
The picture, however, was more complex than what it seemed. As
Hugo Mackern, rugby columnist for The Buenos Aires Herald argued,
Argentine rugby was neither played by foreigners nor oligarchs. As
former player Gonzalo Albarracín stated, "we were middle class,
from the neighborhood. We played the same sport as those from other
traditional elite clubs, but we were different from them". Raúl
Barandiarán, another teammate of several of the disappeared
players, recalled discussing with them whether they should play.
"Some argued that it was incompatible with our political activism;
others, instead, thought that we should continue playing because it
"could serve as a cover for our underground work", as when in 1975
"we went to play a Seven-A-Side match while we were all
clandestine. I was playing with my brother's ID. Some of the club's
officials didn't know, others knew and didn't say anything". Their
political outlook placed La Plata's activist rugbiers at opposite
ends from the clubs of Buenos Aires; at least that is how they
perceived it. The relationship was "tense", the rugbiers that
played in Buenos Aires "said we did not win championships because
we were lefties, they saw our club as a hotbed of extremists".
Although at a much smaller scale, "traditional" elite clubs also
had their victims.
Since 2013 the public initiatives to commemorate the disappeared
rugbiers became a turning point in the history of Argentine rugby.
For almost everyone outside the small circle of relatives and
former teammates, the story of those 163 young men came as a
surprise, a news that many found hard to believe. The reason for
this incredulity was the unlikely association of rugby with radical
politics. How could it be that rugby became a breeding ground for
guerrilleros? The answer lies not in rugby per se, but in who
played it and where, all of which goes to proves that, like any
other sport, rugby was not an island detached from its social
milieu and political context. Likewise, why did the politics of
memory selectively choose the fact of having played rugby in the
past, as children or adolescents, as something relevant to
political activism later in adulthood, when most of the victims had
stopped playing before or soon after they entered the university?
Part of the answer lies in the general process of coming to terms
with the dictatorship through a politics of "memory" (commemoration
of the victims), "truth" (disclosure of information regarding the
crimes) and "justice" (trying the criminals in the courts).
Connected to this, and more specifically, the emergence of what has
been called "the new rugby", a term that refers to the various
initiatives that seek to break away from older conception of rugby
as a sport with exclusive class (bourgeois), gender (masculine) and
ethnic (white European) connotations. The coming of professional
and global rugby after 1995 and the massive exodus of players after
the economic collapse of 2001 triggered a profound and lasting
crisis that forced important changes in the structure of Argentine
rugby. The introduction of women's rugby and the use of this sport
as a tool of social integration among convicts, natives and
different-abilities populations have contributed to bring rugby up
to date and make it truly "popular" in the sense of a sport that is
no longer seen as aloof from the country's social and political
realities.
