Canada’s National Dish: Chile, Pepper Spray and a touch of FIFA
With so many Chileans migrating to Canada in the 70s and 80’s, it was considered a home field advantage for Chile’s U-20 team last night in Toronto, Canada during the semi-finals of the Under 20 FIFA World Cup of Soccer/Futbol. In the end the Chilean team received 2 Red Cards, ejecting 2 players from the Chilean team and leading to a severe confrontation between local police and members of the Chilean team after the match. Many of the players were handcuffed and physically detained inside the stadium after the end of the match.
In front of the Canadian Embassy in Santiago, Chile many people saw the treatment of their national team as discriminatory. Many in Canada, who are not used to passionate expressions of support for a team outside of Hockey viewed the response after the loss by the Chilean team as unorthodox and the Toronto police quickly sought order during the match and after. The view by many in Canada is that the players threatened the overly strict FIFA official at the end of the match and the police quickly responded to the possible threat. In Chile, it was seen by many as a discriminatory response by Canada towards Chile’s national team who had a right to be upset at the poor conduct by the official of the match. While FIFA will likely respond to the actions of the young Chilean players and the strict approach by the official, it seems that the end of a fairly exciting U-20 tournament will likely sour much of the progress made during the last 3 weeks of Fair Play as promoted by FIFA since the infamous head butt by France’s Zidane during the final of the last World Cup.
With Latin passion being responded to with pepper spray, tasers and batons in Canada, there seems to be moments of controversy at the end of each World Cup…at least it will keep people watching. Oh, and Argentina won against Chile 3-0…almost forgot!
July 22nd, 2007 at 7:47 pm
I don’t think “Latin Passion” would be the best way to describe it. Being from Chile doesn’t give one more propensity to fight than anywhere else, unless you can prove a social or scientific disposition to be more likely to erupt in the same situation
It’s similarly erroneous the same way that Chileans are accusing Canada of being racist, because Chile happens to be in South America and Canada in North America. It’s totally absurd and has nothing to do with the national identity of the people, but rather the situation that they were in. But Chilean politicians are quick to pull the race card for political purposes, it’s all pretty sickening but it’s nice to see typical Chilean political hypocrisy exposed on the international stage. Talk about “racist country”.
July 23rd, 2007 at 9:53 am
Id have to agree that it is not a race issue nor specifically “Passion” that can explain the events of last Thursday. I think there are alot of political targets in Chile as well as in Toronto itself, as the Mayor of the city has tended to open his own opinions to the public contrary to other Canadian National officials who are trying to deal with the situation more amicably. In any case beyond all racial issues, I think its more of an issue of why any police would use tasers and pepper spray on 19 and 20 year old kids…no matter where they are from…and the rest is really an issue that FIFA should set an inquiry into.