A LOST GENERATION
The 1978 World Cup in Argentina
- Category: History
- Author/Editor: Daniele Biacchessi
- Format: Essay/Paperback
- Dimension: 15 cms x 23 cms
- Pages: 124
- Price: 20 €
- Year: 2017
Review
It is June 25, 1978. In Buenos Aires, Estadio Monumental, Argentina-Holland, the final of the World Cup, is staged. The climate is overheated, because the Argentina national team wants to win at all costs and cannot be defeated. The match is played in front of the argentinian people, especially in front of the watchful eyes of the Argentine dictator and torturer general Jorge Videla, and those of all the members of the Junta Militar, in power since the night of 24 March 1976, sitting in the grandstand. Next to them, hidden by the spotlights of the cameras, there is an Italian gentleman still unknown to most: he is Licio Gelli, the Venerable of the P2 Masonic lodge, Propaganda 2, entrepreneur, personal friend of the men in power. The match ends 3 to 1 for Argentina. A few hundred meters from the Buenos Aires stadium, in Avenida del Libertador 8151, the torturers of the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, I'ESMA, one of the regime's torture centers, also cheer and embrace their agonizing victims. For at least one evening, from the skies of Argentina, only confetti and festoons fall, and not the bodies of women and men thrown from the doors of the planes towards the black and threatening waters of the ocean. The next day the flights of death will restart punctual and precise. Everything will return to normal, in the absurd abnormality of the Argentine Holocaust. In those days, the world will also know the courage of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo: Dutch television will broadcast images of the march of dozens of women with white handkerchiefs demanding justice for a generation that has disappeared.