Category World News

After a pitched fight involving knives, sticks, and stun grenades in a Buenos Aires stadium that left three seriously injured people, including three football players, between Argentina and Chile, the two sides exchanged blame.

The worst sports violence South America has seen in a long time was the subject of more than 100 arrests.

President of Chile, Gabriel Boric, called for justice and described the events on Wednesday as “unacceptable lynching” of his neighbors.

In a Copa Sudamericana round-sea 16 match between Argentina’s Independiente and Universidad de Chile, violence broke out at halftime.

According to an AFP journalist, Chilean fans started kicking at home supporters with sticks, bottles, and a stun grenade.

Independiente fans invaded the visitors’ area, stripping, beating, and blooding those who couldn’t or would not make it out of.

Eventually, the game was given up.

Andrea Concha Herrera, the country’s consul general in Buenos Aires, reported to reporters that 88 people were still in custody on Thursday night.

One hospitalized with stab wounds, according to the Chilean government, is home to 19 of its citizens.

Boric sent his interior minister to Buenos Aires to accompany the injured and follow the case.

A Universidad fan jumped from the top of the stands to escape his attackers, but miraculously survived, according to Argentinian media reports that three people suffered serious head injuries.

The Chilean fans allegedly tore the toilets out of the bathrooms and threw them into the stands, according to Nestor Grindetti, president of Independiente.

Fans of Independiente, including 29-year-old Facundo Manent, reported to AFP that the Chilean fans were “waving everything you can imagine: rocks, seats, urine, and poop.”

He and a number of fans and players on either side accused the Buenos Aires police of being slow to intervene.

Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, called for “exemple-setting sanctions” and called for “barbaric” behavior.

South America’s top football governing body CONMEBOL promised to take action against those accountable with “the utmost firmness.”

The clubs are subject to a range of punishments, including disqualification and fines.

The news was awaiting the friends and relatives of the arrested fans outside a police station close to the stadium.

Victor Cepeda, who traveled to the game from Santiago, Chile, with two of his friends who had been detained, accused Independiente of failing to provide security.

“They are unable to organize a match this big.” He claimed that everyone is aware of how things get tossed around.

When the game was suspended in the 48th minute, it was called off before being called off.

As the violence broke out, players and match officials sat with their heads raised on the field.

Michael Clark, president of the University of Chile, described it as a “miracle no one is dead.”

Players on both sides made demands for action.

Felipe Loyola, a player for Independiente in Chile, wrote on social media that “this level of violence cannot be tolerated.”

Independiente was criticized by the Chilean National Professional Football Association (ANFP) for its “passivity” in the midst of the violence.

Independiente refuted the accusations, claiming that it had “fully complied with current regulations.”

When it became clear that CONMEBOL had taken an extremely hostile stand, CONMEBOL’s provincial security minister, Javier Alonso, accused the team of taking an excessively long suspension.

Fans’ violence has been a common occurrence in South American football for the past 20 years, killing hundreds of people on the continent.

In January, just before Donald Trump resumed command of the United States on a bevy of sociopathic promises, incoming US border czar Tom Homan announced that the new administration would be “shutting down the Darien Gap” in the interests of “national security”.

The Darien Gap, of course, is the notorious 106km (66-mile) stretch of roadless territory and treacherous jungle that straddles Panama and Colombia at the crossroads of the Americas. For the past several years, it has served as one of the only available pathways to potential refuge for hundreds of thousands of global have-nots who are essentially criminalised by virtue of their poverty and denied the opportunity to engage in “legal” migration to the US.

In 2023 alone, about 520,000 people crossed the Darien Gap, which left them with thousands of kilometres still to go to the border of the US – the very country responsible for wreaking much of the international political and economic havoc that forces folks to flee their homes in the first place.

In a testament to the inherent deadliness of borders – not to mention of existence in general for the impoverished of the world – countless refuge seekers have ended up unburied corpses in the jungle, denied dignity in death as in life. Lethal obstacles abound, ranging from fierce river currents to steep ravines to attacks by armed assailants to the sheer physical exhaustion that attends days or weeks of trekking through hostile terrain without adequate food or water.

And while literally “shutting down” the Darien Gap is about as feasible as shutting down the Mediterranean Sea or the Sahara Desert, the jungle has become drastically less trafficked in the aftermath of the Trump administration’s machinations to shut down the US border itself, essentially scrapping the whole right to asylum in violation of both international and domestic law.

In March, two months into Trump’s term, Panama’s immigration service registered a mere 194 arrivals from Colombia via the Darien Gap – compared with 36,841 arrivals in March of the previous year. This is no doubt music to the xenophobic ears of the US establishment, whose members delight in eternally bleating about the “immigration crisis”.

However, it does not remotely constitute any sort of solution to the real crisis – which is that, thanks in large part to decades of pernicious US foreign policy, life is simply unliveable in a whole lot of places. And “shutting down” the Darien Gap won’t deter desperate people with nothing to lose from pursuing other perilous paths in the direction of perceived physical and economic safety.

Nor can the enduring psychological impact of the Darien trajectory on the survivors of its horrors be understated. While conducting research for my book The Darien Gap: A Reporter’s Journey through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas, published this month by Rutgers University Press, I found it next to impossible to speak with anyone who had made the journey without receiving a rundown of all of the bodies they had encountered en route.

In Panama in February 2023, for example, I spoke with a young Venezuelan woman named Guailis, who had spent 10 days crossing the jungle in the rain with her husband and two-year-old son. Among the numerous corpses they stumbled upon was an elderly man curled up under a tree “like he was cold”. Guailis said she had also made the acquaintance of a bereaved Haitian woman whose six-month-old baby had just drowned right before her eyes.

Guailis’s husband, Jesus, meanwhile, had experienced a more intimate interaction with a lifeless body when, tumbling down a formidable hill, he had grabbed onto what he thought was a tree root but turned out to be a human hand protruding from the mud. Recounting the incident to me, Jesus reasoned: “That hand saved my life.”

I heard about bloated corpses floating in the river, about a dead woman sprawled in a tent with her two dead newborn twins and about another dead woman with two dead children and a man who had hanged himself nearby – presumably the children’s father.

A Venezuelan woman named Yurbis, part of an extended family of 10 that I spent a good deal of time with in Mexico in late 2023, offered the following calculation regarding the prevalence of bodies in the jungle: “I can say that we have all stepped on dead people.”

For pretty much every step of the way, then, refuge seekers transiting the Darien Gap were reminded of the disconcerting proximity of death – and the negligible value assigned to their own lives in a US-led world order.

Add to that the surge in rapes and other forms of sexual violence with The New York Times reporting in April 2024 that the “sexual assault of migrants” on the Panamanian side of the jungle had risen to a “level rarely seen outside war” – and it becomes painfully clear that the individual and collective trauma signified by the Darien Gap is not something that will be summarily resolved by its ostensible “shutting-down”.

That said, the Darien Gap has also served as a venue for the display of incredible solidarity in the face of structural dehumanisation. I met a young Colombian man who had personally saved an infant from being swept away in a river. I was also told of a Venezuelan man who had carried an ailing one-year-old Ecuadorean girl through the jungle when her mother, too weak to move at a rapid pace, feared she wouldn’t make it out in time to seek medical help.

When I myself staged an incursion into the Darien Gap in January 2024, two refuge seekers from Yemen complimented me on my Palestine football shirt and did their best to assuage my apparently visible terror at entering the jungle: “If you need anything, we are here.” This from folks who had for more than two decades been on the receiving end of quite literal terror, courtesy of my own country, as successive US administrations went about waging covert war on Yemen.

The Darien Gap, too, has functioned as a de facto warzone in its own right where punitive US policy plays out on vulnerable human bodies in the interests of maintaining systemic inequality. Widely referred to in Spanish as “el infierno verde”, or The Green Hell, the gap has certainly lived up to its nickname.

And while the heyday of the Darien Gap may be at least temporarily over, the territory remains an enduring symbol of one of the defining crises of the modern era in which the global poor must risk their lives to live and are criminalised for doing so. In that sense, then, the Darien Gap is the world.