By SIMON ROMERO
Published: June 17, 2007
BOLIVIA’S president, Evo Morales, donned a green jersey the other day, watched a llama sacrifice for good luck and flew to a snowy spot nearly four miles above sea level, where he scored the winning goal in a brief match pitting him and his aides against a group of mountain climbers.
It was a textbook lesson in Andean political theater, and the perils a globalized sport can meet when it comes up against a small country’s nationalist passions.
On the surface, Bolivia’s president was simply staging an amusing stunt to fight a ban on international soccer games at altitudes above 2,500 meters, or 8,200 feet.
It’s well known that Mr. Morales will play soccer against virtually anyone, from the foreign press corps to local squads in the hinterlands, to let off steam, and recently broke his nose doing so. But in fact, the ban, enacted last month by soccer bureaucrats in Switzerland, played right to Mr. Morales’ trademark populism, and gave him an opportunity to act as a unifier of his otherwise fractious country.
“Bolivia’s dedication to soccer cuts across the deep dividing lines in the country, which are economic, racial, regional and ideological,” said Jim Shultz, a political analyst in Cochabamba, in central Bolivia. “Fighting the ban is great domestic politics.”
Mr. Morales was relying on an old Latin American tradition of mixing political intrigue with the “beautiful game.” The classic example involved a poisonous set of land and trade disputes between El Salvador and Honduras that boiled over into war in 1969 only after tensions rose over World Cup qualifying matches that year.
This time, the argument is ostensibly about altitude. The Federation of International Football Associations contends that soccer at great heights is medically challenging (nose accidents aside), because the air is thinner.
That position is contested by some experts. Robert C. Roach, assistant director at the University of Colorado’s Center for Altitude Medicine and Physiology, said it was hard to see any evidence of an advantage for Bolivia, since the country is not a powerhouse in world soccer. And if Bolivians gain something from playing regularly in the thin air of the mountains, they may suffer from being less accustomed to playing in the heat at sea level, he suggested.
“Heat is far more challenging for athletes than altitude,” he said.
In Cochabamba, where a hometown team with the fanciful name of Club Jorge Wilstermann is affected by the ban, the president’s struggle against FIFA drew support even from Gov. Manfred Reyes Villa, one of Mr. Morales’s fiercest critics.
Restricting competitions to stadiums closer to sea level is a special affront to a landlocked, mountainous country that has never been able to accept the loss of its coastline to Chile in a 19th-century war. Each March, Bolivia officially bemoans the loss in a Day of the Sea; marching in a place of honor are units from the Bolivian Navy, which is restricted these days to patrolling rivers and lakes.
The ban has helped bolster Mr. Morales, a former organizer of the coca growers’ union, a one-time llama herder and a self-proclaimed advocate for the indigenous people who live high in the mountains and champion the use of coca tea to counteract light-headedness there.
Those affiliations had made him a divisive figure, raising talk of secession and demands for greater political autonomy in the eastern lowlands. Now, the fight for high-altitude soccer is seen as a national cause.
The issue has even rallied other political leaders in the Andes, since the ban also affects Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Alan García, Peru’s president, called the ban “Europeanist and insolent,” but that does not reflect the full range and complexity of national passions involved. Much of the support for the ban, in fact, comes from neighboring Brazil, the region’s economic and soccer supremo.
After visiting Bolivia to play in Potosí last February in freezing rain at about 13,120 feet, Flamengo, one of Brazil’s most eminent teams, reportedly pushed FIFA into its decision by lodging a formal complaint. “The only thing I don’t understand is why it took so long to make the decision,” Edson Arantes do Nascimento, the Brazilian soccer legend better known as Pelé, told reporters.
Bolivians chafe at such comments from a big neighbor, and that only gives the fight against the ban even more of a nationalist tinge that plays to Mr. Morales’ advantage. He had already shocked Brasília by asserting greater control over the energy industry, a move that disrupted large investments in Bolivia by Petrobrás, Brazil’s state-controlled energy company.
Within Bolivia, the most pointed criticism of Mr. Morales, who is of Aymara heritage and is often portrayed as the country’s first indigenous president, tends to come from Santa Cruz, a relatively prosperous business-oriented city in the east where secessionist feeling has been running high and explicitly racist anti-Morales graffiti covers the walls.
But even there — a low-lying city where FIFA would allow games to be held — some see in Mr. Morales’s battle a position they can admire.
Eduardo Gamarra, a Bolivian political scientist at Florida International University, said Cruceños could sympathize with the highlanders since many of the top players at clubs in high-altitude cities affected by the ban come from the eastern lowlands. “FIFA has done Evo a big favor,” Mr. Gamarra said.
One commentator in El Deber, the main daily newspaper in Santa Cruz, called the ban “segregationist, shameful and ridiculous.” Another accused Joseph Blatter, the Swiss president of FIFA, of being “calculating and evasive.”
To Bolivians, it is a fair charge. A quote from Mr. Blatter, who was once considered a defender of Bolivia’s exceptionalism, is still engraved on a wall outside Hernando Siles Stadium in La Paz. It reads: “I was born among the mountains. My village is opposite the highest mountains in Europe. Heights don’t scare me.”
