Alejandro Gallego’s match ended in a coffin after the 25-year-old was one of three people killed during a knife fight between rival Atletico Nacional and Independiente Medellin soccer hooligans last month.
“It’s the most absurd thing that can happen, they’re killing kids over a club badge,” his distraught father, William Gallego, told reporters after the funeral. “Football is not about killing each other.”
Hooliganism is a major problem in Colombian soccer. There have been 350 soccer-related deaths in the country, according to academic studies.
Photo: AFP
Despite calls to come down hard on the perpetrators, Colombian President Gustavo Petro has decided on an alternative policy: Dialogue.
It is a tactic he has already employed with belligerent armed groups as part of his “total peace” plan to end six decades of conflict in the South American country.
Last month, the government organized the first ever meeting between the leaders of hooligan groups and authorities.
Photo: AFP
“We have to talk with them ... they can help us resolve” the situation, Colombian Minister of the Interior Luis Fernando Velasco said during the meeting. “Without their commitment, the problem worsens.”
Petro has a history of fostering relations with soccer hooligans, known as barras bravas or just barras in Spanish.
When he was mayor of Bogota from 2012 to 2015, he created a scheme employing young barra members, who often come from socially disadvantaged neighborhoods, in city hall.
“When the president was mayor of Bogota, he developed a program called Goals and Territories in Peace, through which he got many young people involved in social programs, that were also jobs,” said researcher Alirio Amaya, who has been tasked by the country’s rights ombudsman to build relationships with groups of barras.
“These were young people who work three days and study four days” a week, Amaya said. “He created possibilities in many [government] entities to involve young hooligans” in employment.
Petro then lent on those relationships in 2021 during protests against the previous government.
“I invite all the football barras throughout the whole country to take out their team jerseys and get out onto the streets and march for the great game of Equality and Peace in Colombia,” Petro wrote on Twitter at the time.
Rival barras also put aside their differences to support Petro on his successful campaign trail last year.
“There were various types of violence that we had to subdue to come together” during the campaign, said Kevany de Arco, a leader of the barras for the Popular Junior team in Barranquilla.
The government’s approach to combating hooliganism is at odds with that of Colombia’s soccer federation, which wants to install metal barriers between rival supporters, and between fans and the pitch.
Federation president Fernando Jaramillo said that such measures have worked in other countries, but Velasco has ruled them out, saying that the state must resolve the underlying “social tensions” that lead to soccer violence.
De Arco said that away from the violence, barras have “their own culture.”
Amaya has met with the leaders of barras from Popular Junior and Union Magdalena in Santa Marta. Last year, a fan died in clashes between the two teams’ barras.
Authorities need “to understand the dynamics of violence” between rival supporters, Amaya said.
Others simply demand a heavy handed response to violence.
Colombian Attorney-General Francisco Barbosa called recent violence “acts of urban terrorism” and hit out at the government for failing to deal with it.
The approach amounts simply to banning barras from stadiums, Amaya said.
Many people act as if “the barras don’t deserve anything,” he said.
However, “the government has shown ... that it has a different path” for combating soccer violence, he said.
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