As you should know Bob, during the Argentinian dictatorship of the seventies and early eighties, the Argentine military waged a dirty war against its own people, disappearing thousands of trade unionists, activists, socialists and other leftists and all other sorts of socalled subversives. Most of the disappered were first tortured then killed, were often young, in their tens, twenties or thirties, sometimes had children of their own who also disappered, being adopted by the very same people who tortured and murdered their parents. And it was not just leftists who got disappeared: ask too many questions and you would be tortured and murdered as well. But some of the mothers of disappeared people refused to be intimidated and kept asking the government where their children were and when they got no answers, they started a silent protest on the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, keeping up throughout the dictatorship even though several of the original mothers were disappeared in turn. They did not stop when the dictatorship ended, but kept up demanding answers, keeping up their weekly protest until 2006, when finally a government was elected that wasn’t interested in continuing the coverup. In later years, as the truth did start to come out the mothers also campaigned for the truth about the children of the disappeared, those adopted by their killers.
It’s not surprising then that the Argentine football team chose to honour these women at the start of the Worldcup, by calling for them to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. If any groups deserve it, they are. What is surprising is how little attention this gesture got in the mainstream meda. I myself only read about this today, on Inveresk Street Ingrate. You would think this should’ve gotten more coverage, as such a political statement is not exactly common amongst footballers. The Worldcup itself after all is tainted by having been held in Argentine at the height of the dictatorship, in 1978. Perhaps this is why it was slipped by almost unnoticed?