Bolivians Protest FIFA’s Ban on High-Altitude Games

Sepp Blatter will not be walking the streets of Bolivia any time soon. The FIFA president is public enemy number one in the Andean country after announcing the decision to ban games at altitudes above 2500 meters. The move has angered many Bolivians, who claim it is discriminatory.

FIFA president Sepp Blatter

Blatter attempted to justify the ban of high altitude games with what is normally a water-tight justification: medical necessity. He said, “The executive committee have listened to a proposal from the medical committee and have decided to act because to play at above that altitude is not healthy …”

But Blatter may not have realized that countries affected by this decision would be so vociferous in their rebuttals. The most outspoken has been Bolivia, whose president, Evo Morales, said, “It is possible to play soccer just as much at high altitudes as low altitudes.” To prove his point, Morales, an avowed soccer fanatic, took to the streets of La Paz (altitude 3600 meters) and played four straight games.

Evo Morales warms up for his protest games by jumping on a trampoline

Morales reached out to other affected countries and received support from other Andean countries. The mayor of Quito, Ecuador called for street protests and hundreds of people exercised in the city to show that the city’s altitude (2800 meters) was not dangerous. His counterpart in Bogota, Colombia has pledged to climb to 3300 meters to protest FIFA’s decision. Morales is planning to unite all of these voices of protest in a “unity meeting” tomorrow (June 6).

While most of the Andean ire has been directed at FIFA, some in those countries believe their wealthier South American neighbors played a part. Immediately after the announcement, Bolivian officials claimed that Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay had pushed for the decision (though, bizarrely, Morales claimed that the Argentine and Uruguayan presidents support his protests).

Some bloggers believe there is a conspiracy involving wealthy South American countries and FIFA. Bolivian blogger Hugo Miranda writes that “FIFA is only looking for money and unfortunately that in order that its sponsors continue to give out these amounts of money they need the same teams: Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay to be part of the [World Cup].”

Like FIFA, these countries have claimed to be concerned about the potential health risks of playing at high altitudes. But Andean highlanders have been quick with their response, saying that, for them, playing in heat and humidity is just as dangerous.

All of these medical rationales are, as yet, unproven. A conference is scheduled later this month in Paraguay in which medical experts on high altitude will present their work. But this conference will not likely settle the debate, as it has become about much more than medical necessity.

The decision is also about fairness, as Blatter himself pointed out. A quick look at the home and away records of Andean nations will demonstrate how much of an advantage the altitude of their stadiums gives them against opponents. But their response, and in particular that of Evo Morales, may be as much about identity.

Most of Bolivia’s indigenous peoples (around half of the population overall) live in the Andean highlands. Indigenous identity has become closely tied with living at altitude. Morales is particularly sensitive to this issue, as he is himself the first indigenous president of Bolivia. The decision to ban games at altitude was certainly not intended as a slight toward the indigenous population, but it was likely seen that way in many parts of Bolivia.

In many ways, this controversy mirrors that surrounding coca growing in Bolivia. Upon being sworn in to office, one of the first moves Evo Morales made was to suggest he would be less supportive of American efforts to eradicate coca growing than his predecessors. Coca, which can be made into cocaine, is significant to the indigenous in Bolivia, many of whom continue to chew the plant to this day. Like the altitude ban, the recent US policy of coca eradication in Bolivia was not intended as an insult to the country’s indigenous population, but was seen as such. In both cases, the expressed intentions of the decision and its interpretation varied widely.

Coca leaves for sale in a Bolivian market

The difference between the altitude ban and coca eradication is that Morales has control over the latter, but not the former. As Bolivian president, he is able to decide how much American money to accept for coca eradication, but has little influence on Sepp Blatter and his band of naive bigwigs at FIFA (but then, who does?). Morales’s “unity meeting” will begin tomorrow, but it’s unclear whether FIFA will be listening to the voices of Andean people.

Even if the meeting has no effect, the controversy has provided a good opportunity for some cross-border smack talk, as reported by the AP. Among those in the streets of La Paz to protest the altitude ban was “71-year-old Beatriz Ordonez, who spent Wednesday morning dancing in the streets of La Paz, merrily waving a yellow handkerchief to the beat of the music and not even breathing hard.” What did Ordonez think of those who complain about having to play in the altitude of Bolivia? “Brazilians are wimps,” she said.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Economics, Ethnicity/Race, In the News, Latin America. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.