Politics and football are two topics that they say should not be debated at the table. However, they are more related than is believed and this is confirmed by an episode that was also treated as a national security problem.
While the first month of Iván Duque’s government was running and diplomatic relations with the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro were broken, the soccer teams of both countries competed in a sports arena that days before was described as one of the safest in the United States. .
Colombia vs. Venezuela is the most important football match for these two eleventh; It is a classic given the common historical origin of the two nations –Simón Bolívar liberated them both and they became part of Gran Colombia–. They have faced each other on the pitch more than 40 times, with the coffee squad, ours, being the most successful. It is not so important what the venue of the match is, the name of the competition or if it is a friendly, this match is always a final that must be played until the last minute.
On September 7, 2018, the venue was the Hard Rock Stadium, in Miami, a city that is home to a large colony of Latinos with origins in Cuba, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela, and -unlike the previous games- this was surrounded by tension for the White House security agencies, who saw the real probability of an attack by extremist groups. This was recorded in a document from the Southwest Florida Security Agency (Southeast Florida Fusion Center), which remained classified for four years and has just been found within the “Blueleaks” leak, which was carried out by the hacker movement Anonymous.
The alarm was based on precedents such as the classic that was played at the San Cristóbal stadium (Táchira State), held just over a year ago on that date, in August 2017. There, the fans shouted “this government is going to to fall”, a harangue that left Maduro in a bad light, since the match had a wide audience worldwide. A week earlier, the governor of Táchira had published audios on Twitter about how the opposition to the government planned to carry out an attack on the field where the appointment for the 2018 World Cup in Russia would be held.
Additionally, the terrorists had already made themselves felt with a bomb in the Manchester Arena, during an Ariana Grande concert, causing the death of 22 people and injuring 116 more. The attacks in France, perpetrated between 2015 and 2016, were also fresh. And in June of that same year they had canceled a friendly between Argentina and Israel that was going to be played in Jerusalem for fear that an attack would become a reality.
“Football stadiums or events that call for the agglomeration of a large number of people are always at risk of being a possible catastrophe,” indicates the document recently declassified by force.
According to the report, the grandiose surveillance operation deployed by the Miami police included facial recognition cameras and metal detectors at the entrances to the stadium, as well as monitoring tweets and social media accounts that spoke out against the dictator. Ripe.
Likewise, it highlights that the arrival of players such as Falcao García, Juan Fernando Cuadrado and David Ospina was a cause for concern about how to preserve their integrity, given the large number of followers who mobilized then and continue to mobilize, and could be the target of terrorists.
The day of the game arrived. It was 90 minutes of a very close game. The red wine started winning from minute 4 with a goal from midfielder Machís. Only in the 55th minute the coffee tricolor were able to equalize the score with a goal from Falcao. The tie seemed inevitable, but at the last minute Chará made the difference, allowing the Colombians to pocket the victory. The closing went smoothly. There was no major altercation, much less a terrorist tragedy, as feared.
