Today's Argentina, with more than 40% of its population below the poverty line, an annual inflation that in 2023 will exceed 170% and with the recently inaugurated presidency of the far-right Javier Milei, has greater needs and emergencies to resort to. the anniversaries, that branch of the tree of nostalgia. But there is an exception: that the anniversary involves a reminder of the country's happiest days in recent decades. If the football nation, that is, a large portion of society, celebrated this Monday the first year of the final of the Qatar 2022 World Cup – the sports channels broadcast the match against France in which the “Albiceleste” won its third World Cup and The players, led by Lionel Messi, wrote evocative posts on their social networks, this Wednesday's commemoration will be for the first anniversary of an even more extraordinary event.
On December 20, 2022, two days after Messi entered the pantheon of Argentine demigods in Doha, a crowd impossible to calculate but estimated at five million people took to the streets of Buenos Aires and its periphery to try to see, although be it from a distance, to the open-top bus in which the champions traveled after their return to the country. In Argentina, similar congregations are not remembered, at least to celebrate a sporting triumph, which in the meaning of Latin America is very close to a national claim. December 20 could become a date declared “Argentine Fan Day” if a recent idea from the Argentine Football Association (AFA) prospers in the coming months. The motion has already been presented in the national Congress – each club celebrates its own “Fan's Day” – and awaits treatment.
That explosion of collective endorphins also acts as a bubble of happiness in a country with hair standing on end. The first anniversary of the most festive mobilization, this Wednesday, will have an enormous contrast in the streets. This time, the demonstrations on the central asphalt of Buenos Aires will not be celebrations but protests. “On December 20, the fight against the adjustment of the chainsaw against hunger begins,” warned piqueteros, union and Human Rights leaders who will march today against the brand new economic measures of Milei, the president who will face his first street challenge. The tension is such that the Minister of Security, Patricia Bullrich, announced a protocol that prohibits street closures that restrict free movement.
If a year ago the Plaza de Mayo, one of the iconic meeting centers of Argentines in front of the Casa Rosada, was filled with fans who waited – in vain – for the arrival of the world champions, for this Wednesday thousands of fans are expected. people in the same place. The date seems marked in red to record the recent history of the country.
Another December 20, but in 2001, police repression and the murder of dozens of protesters in the rest of downtown Buenos Aires marked with blood the end of the presidency of Fernando De la Rúa, who escaped from the Government House by helicopter. In 2022, however, the helicopters that flew above the celebrating crowd transported the footballers who had not been able to reach the Plaza de Mayo or the Obelisk by land because it was impossible for them. With the streets filled with fans, the solution was for the team to leave the bus and rehearse an Olympic lap by air.
The relationship between Argentina and football has been umbilical since the beginning of the 20th century, but it has never had – nor possibly will have – such an exceptional day as a year ago today. If the “Albiceleste” has three stars sewn on its shirt, the World Cups are a four-year competition and the stadiums became increasingly exclusive settings, December 20, 2022 marked the return of football to the streets, to the plain , without economic, social or political divisions: the players and fans united at the end of a World Cup that seemed to have had two venues, played in Qatar and lived in Argentina.
After the Albiceleste's first title in the 1978 World Cup, organized in an Argentina under dictatorship, the second star came in 1986. The day after Diego Maradona lifted the Cup in Mexico, a crowd gathered to receive the champions at the Ezeiza airport, 30 kilometers from Buenos Aires. The bus that was to take the players to the Plaza de Mayo and the Casa Rosada, where President Raúl Alfonsín was waiting for them, took seven hours to complete a journey that is usually done in 40 minutes. Even given the crowding, the vehicle had to change route and proceed along an alternative path, but finally reached its destination. In 2022 there was no way.
The sporting value of the three stars is the same but a host of factors aligned so that 2022 has converged in the greatest communion between players and fans. A less masculine football than in previous decades – still sexist, but with more participation of women and children than then -, a World Cup with hot temperatures that invited people to go outside – an atypicality for countries in the southern hemisphere -, a generation of young people who finally consecrated the heroes of their time, the canonization of Messi, the electronic devices that helped spread joy and spread it throughout the country with the multiplication of viral and memes and, of course, the need to celebrating a country in crisis. The Copa América won in Brazil in 2021 had already acted as a symbolic end to a long and painful pandemic: Argentina's first title in 28 years, after the 1993 Copa América, inaugurated a chemical relationship between the “kids” and the national team. Lionel Scaloni.
On December 20, 2022, Messi celebrated on the bus like any other Argentine boy: with a jug of Fernet and cola, a medium alcoholic mixture that is very common in the country. More glasses of champagne, wine and beer were passed from hand to hand between the rest of the players and the coaching staff, while the fans closest to the airport were lucky enough to reach the foot or side of the transport.
At a snail's pace, the team advanced a handful of kilometers along the Ricchieri highway, in the territory of the province of Buenos Aires and, just before entering the Federal Capital, it detoured towards a state agency where there were helicopters. Without sunscreen, and after several hours of slow procession, the players' skin was already red and it was clear that they could not continue moving forward. Even their safety was in danger: a couple of boys—anonymous, whose name was never known—jumped from a bridge to the roof of the bus.
The millions of Argentines who were waiting in the Plaza de Mayo, the Obelisk and the route that the bus was supposed to take would no longer be able to see Messi and his team, but nothing overshadowed a date that had become a parenthesis of happiness sheltered from the crisis. , also on its first anniversary.
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