Jakarta –
The worst stadium disaster in the world occurred in the Peruvian capital, Lima, in 1964. More than 300 people have died, but the full story is unknown and probably never will be.
“The police didn’t let the dogs out, but they ripped their clothes off,” recalled Hector Chumpitaz, one of the Peruvian football legends, who was playing and witnessed the start of the tragedy.
“People get annoyed at the way the police took away a bystander who broke into the camp. It made them angry.
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We don’t know what would have happened if they had removed him from the field peacefully, but we can’t think about it right now. “
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Chumpitaz then made more than 100 appearances for the Peruvian national team. He captained the team at the 1970 and 1978 World Cups, but almost stopped playing football after this disastrous match at the start of his international career.
When it hosted Argentina on May 24, 1964, Peru was second in the rankings of the South American group’s Olympic qualifying tournament.
They are quite confident. But while Brazil awaits the final match, Peru needs at least a draw against Argentina.
The stadium was packed with a capacity of 53,000, just over 5% of Lima’s population at the time.
“Even though we played well, they took the lead,” recalled Chumpitaz.
“We attacked, they defended and continued until one moment the defender was about to throw the ball – and our player, Kilo Lobaton, lifted his foot to block and the ball bounced into the net – but the referee did. said it was foul, so the goal was invalid. This is why the audience is getting angry. “
Quickly, two spectators entered the field. The first was a security guard known as Bomba; he tried to hit the referee but was stopped by the police and dragged off the pitch.
The second man, Edilberto Cuenca, suffered a brutal attack.
“Our own police kicked and beat him as if he were an enemy. This is what angered everyone, including mine,” said Estadio Nacional fan Jose Salas that day.
Within seconds, the crowd threw various objects at the police. Several dozen people were trying to reach the camp. Reading the atmosphere, Salas and his friends decided to leave.
“The five of us walked down the stairs to the street – as many others do – but the exit gate was closed,” he said.
“So we turned around and started up the stairs again, and that’s when the police started shooting tear gas. Then the people in the stands ran into the tunnel to escape – where they met us – so there was an escape. precipitous “.
Salas was in the north stand, where the greatest number of tear gas fell, between 12 and 20.
Salas felt he had spent about two hours in the crowd of people slowly coming down the stairs. The crowd was so thick, he said, that his feet didn’t touch the floor until he was at the bottom, trapped in a pile of corpses, some alive and some dead.
Official records say most of the victims died of asphyxiation. But what made this stadium disaster different from the others was what was happening in the streets outside the stadium.
Some fans who had already left the stadium managed to open the gates and free those trapped inside, while others were involved in clashes with the armed police.
“Some young people from my housing complex walked by and saw me. I was pretty skinny and eventually they pulled me out,” he said.
“But then the shooting started and they ran away. Bullets everywhere. I started running and I didn’t look back.”
During that time, even Chumpitaz could not leave.
“After we got to the locker room some people came out and when they came back they said there had been two deaths. ‘Two deaths?’ we asked. One is enough. We stayed in the locker room for two hours before we could leave, so we didn’t know the extent of what was going on.
AFP
“On the way back to the training camp, we listened to the radio and they told us there were 10, 20, 30 deaths. Each time there was news, the number increased: 50 dead, 150, 200, 300, 350 “.
The official death toll is 328, but this is likely an underestimate, as it does not include gunshot victims.
There have been many eyewitness accounts of people dying from gunshot wounds, but the judge in charge of investigating the disaster, Judge Benjamin Castaneda, was never able to find the bodies to prove it.
Hearing of two bodies with gunshot wounds at Lima Loayza hospital, he rushed to examine them, he told me when I interviewed him 14 years ago. When he arrived, a vehicle had just left.
“When I got to the morgue, I met someone I knew,” he said. “I asked him if there were two bodies with bullet wounds. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but they just took them.'”
A few months after the tragedy, Castaneda was approached by an elderly man who said his two sons, both medical students, had left the province to attend the game and never returned.
“Even though he looked for their names in the victim list, he couldn’t find them,” Castaneda told me.
“He made further inquiries, but found nothing. So I told him that I had news that several people had died after being shot and that, unfortunately, I would never be able to find their identity because everything it had been hidden from me. “
In his report, Castaneda said the death toll provided by the government “did not reflect the actual toll, as there were strong suspicions about the secret transfer of those killed by the bullets.”
He later accused the then Interior Minister of orchestrating the entry of spectators into the camp and that the police responded brutally to incite the mob to violence – hence the reason for the violent act.
The show of force was intended, Castaneda said, to “make the public learn, with blood and tears” that there are risks in going against the authorities.
Meanwhile, the government has accused the group of Trotskyist agitators.
Jorge Salazar, a journalist and professor who wrote a book about the disaster, said Peruvian society was very unstable at the time.
“It was the sixties, it was the Beatles days, Fidel Castro was in fashion – everything in the world has changed,” he said.
“In Peru there is talk of social justice for the first time. There are many demonstrations, a labor movement and a communist party. The left is strong enough and there are always clashes between the police and the people.”
Many football fans have fled the tear gas, apparently seeking revenge on the police. Two policemen were reportedly killed inside the stadium and fighting continued in the streets outside.
Fifty years later, the Peruvian deputy Alberto Beingolea asked his people to observe a minute of silence in honor of the dead. He doubted that the violence was premeditated by the government or the revolutionaries.
But he didn’t dismiss the idea that people had died from gunshot wounds.
“Two of these deaths are possible, especially if you are in a climate of chaos, as was the case at that time,” he said. “When someone causes chaos, the police must respond – and at any time, it can result in a shooting.”
Peru has never made a serious effort to thoroughly investigate the causes of the disaster at the Estadio Nacional, and this probably never will.
BBC Stadium Estadio Nacional today
What we do know is that those who are punished can be counted on two fingers.
Jorge Azambuja, the police commander who gave the order to shoot tear gas, was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
Another convict was Judge Castaneda himself. He was fined for submitting his report six months late and not attending all 328 autopsies as he should have. The report was rejected.
Now, Castaneda is dead.
He told me in 2000: “I asked for bodies everywhere but I never found anything. They said – without official confirmation of any kind – that they were buried in Callao”.
The head of the Peruvian Institute of Sport – one of the country’s four Olympic medalists, Francisco Boza – did what he had never done before: contacting families affected by the tragedy and inviting them to a long-awaited mass in Lima’s cathedral.
Yet no plaques have yet been displayed at the Estadio Nacional to commemorate those who died in the deadliest disaster in football history.
Interviews with Benjamin Castaneda, Jose Salas and Jorge Salazar conducted in 2000
Watch video: expert says tear gas caused the death of Kanjuruhan tragedy
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