A soccer team from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s most dangerous city, has defied expectations by reaching the semi-finals of the national championship, with its star player a former drug-using gang member.
“People can finally see something other than violence,” former juvenile delinquent and top striker Julio Daniel Frias, who grew up in the volatile border city, said.
The Indios team avoids the usual bling often associated with soccer players, such as luxury cars, Frias said, to avoid being targeted in his home town, where more than 1,500 people were killed in suspected drug attacks last year alone.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Attackers once robbed a goalkeeper of his car at gunpoint, and a local newspaper erroneously reported the same player had been beheaded.
“All the players have made a major effort in the team to provide something positive amid the violence,” Frias said.
The Indios team barely hoped to cling on to its place in the first division at the start of the season in January.
But last weekend the team beat reigning champions and title favorites Toluca in the quarter finals of the Mexican championship.
“There’s never been anything like this in Ciudad Juarez,” said Frias, a 30-year-old former gang member, after returning home to cheering supporters at the city’s airport after last weekend’s game.
Regardless of whether the team beat their next opponent — top team Pachuca — in semi final playoffs today and on Sunday, it has already provided inspiration for many youths in the border city across from El Paso, Texas.
“They’re calling me a model for all the young people tied up in gangs and drug addiction,” Frias said. “My life may help inspire them because I had the same problems and now I’m a professional soccer player.”
Frias used to take drugs and belonged to a gang that spread fear through a rough neighborhood years before fighting between traffickers spiraled in Ciudad Juarez.
Officials threw Frias into a youth detention center when he was 17 years old.
“When I came out I had my son and I began to behave better,” Frias said. “Then soccer really helped me to get out of all of that.”
But the player did not immediately return to legality on his bumpy ride to soccer success.
Frias was later a “wetback” who swam across the Rio Grande to enter the US illegally to seek work.
“There are many players who stop playing for six months and don’t return. In my case I returned very hungry for success [and] to be someone. I enjoy it more now because of everything I suffered to get here,” Frias said.
“The team believes that since we’ve managed to beat the championship favorite, anything can happen,” he said.
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