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The maracanazo, or how Uruguay became independent for the second time

Maracana Stadium in 1950 (DP)

That a landing of thirty-three people -actually a few more- would end in independence was an almost unthinkable possibility even for the adventurous soldiers who planted their tricolor flag on the beach with the motto “Liberty or death”. As unthinkable as the Uruguayan national team defeating, more than a hundred years later, the favorite Brazil that was playing at home, in the Maracana Stadium, in front of a quarter of a million people, and with all the public, the one there and the one from world, fully convinced that defeat awaited them. It would have been the great moment of the Uruguay sports betting If the internet had already existed at that time.

Uruguay has a singularity as a country, because it was not born, like others, from the process of independence of the American colonies from the Spanish colony, but from a later process whose objective was to free itself from Brazilian colonialism. Initially its territory was included in the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, as an Eastern Province. But the Oriental would be invaded and claimed by Brazil, causing an insurrection that was organized and planned in Buenos Aires. And whose greatest historical milestone is the Landing of the Thirty-Three Orientals, the start of a war that would leave, after three years, both sides stuck in an unresolved conflict. The British Empire, interested in ending the conflict, would send one of its diplomats, Lord Ponsoby, with the singular idea that the Eastern Province would become independent from Argentine rule, and also from Brazil, establishing itself as an independent nation. And although at first the idea was not welcomed by either side, it was the one that ended up prevailing. Almost as unexpectedly, as in the final of 1950.

That game has been told from many points of view, but one of the least highlighted, and yet the most important given the date it was played, was the radio broadcast from the Uruguayan side. In 1950, radio was the sports medium par excellence, with television not yet established, and this resource constituted almost the only access, sound, not visual, to all the spectators who could not be in the stadium. And if someone reached one of the peaks of sports broadcasting when the images were provided by the listener’s imagination, that was the gift. Duilio de Feo, the Uruguayan broadcaster. Listening to fragments of the most relevant moments of the match, one is able to forget about the final, the time, and even football, carried away by the absolute passion of who would be called the “speaker of victory”. Even today, regardless of your nationality or your preference for sports or teams, you feel genuinely drawn to participate in the Uruguayan feat by his voice.

Gesta is not a word chosen at random for this game, nor a topic. Don Duilio’s account of what he found when he arrived by taxi at the Maracana prepared him to narrate the expected defeat. The crowd of Brazilians had been camped out around the stadium for days, and now they were standing in line, many hours before the match began. When he took the place reserved for his station, La Voz del Aire, the stands were still empty. When some two hundred thousand people later, two hundred and fifty thousand according to some estimates, filled them, the shouts and fireworks did not stop ascending into the sky. Without even being the loudest demonstration, because the arrival of the Brazilian team was greeted by a salute of twenty-one guns, followed by the release of a thousand pigeons, confetti dropped from a plane, and balloons released in the stands that ascended in large multicolored groups. . They were celebrating the victory, even though they hadn’t even started playing.

And it’s not that Brazil was just going to win, it was what everyone expected, Brazilians, Uruguayans, and other fans who had followed the World Cup. In addition, the host country was finally going to conclude, or so they hoped, a gradual rise in world football that they had been working on since the 1930s. They were already a world power as players and as a team, but the World Cups had thrown them off the podium time and time again. In successive years Yugoslavia, then Spain, Italy, had defeated them, and then, with World War II, they had a long period without competition. So 1950 was the right date to make up for those defeats and consolidate Brazilian dominance once and for all.

Precisely one of the things that the Uruguayan presenter highlighted the most in his interviews was the suffering that he would finally see in the audience at the Maracana. “Wow, it seems that we did great damage to an entire nation…”. Don Duilio was saddened by the result, and even more so thinking of all those people who he planned to return to the favelas celebrating a party and who limped back as if at a funeral.

And it is not that they were only an audience of fans who had come to witness the final of the national team. They had been thoroughly prepared, by the authorities of their own country, to experience something that would be the before and after of dictatorial Brazil. The nation had the first democratically elected president after the dictatorship of Getulio Vargas, and there was a genuine intention to demonstrate that they were a capable state, open to foreign investment, to diplomacy, and capable of definitively modernizing. They had a great mission to accomplish. And precisely to achieve this, and exhibit it, they built what was at that time the largest stadium in the world, and it was no small thing, the Brazilians themselves joked, in a country where everything they do is the best of the world.

The development of the World Cup was also favoring that mentality absolutely confident in victory. Six to one they scored against Spain, seven to one against Sweden. The political authorities, also heating up the atmosphere, promised big fees to the players if they won, as well as hefty cash rewards. Even at the Maracana, after the cannon fire, fireworks, doves and confetti, Angelo Mendes de Morais, mayor of Rio de Janeiro, gave an absolutely triumphant speech. «You Brazilians, whom I consider the winners of the world championship; you Brazilians who in less than a few hours will be acclaimed champions by thousands of compatriots; you who have no rivals in the entire hemisphere; you who surpass any other competitor; you whom I already salute as victors!». A few words that can be considered an error of judgment, rarely do we see a politician promising something with such force when it comes to such a short term. Even if, as was the case, the elections were coming up. But more than a mistake, it was more an expression of the absolute conviction they had in victory.

So it can’t surprise us that the teacher Robert DaMatta, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, described the maracanazo as “the greatest tragedy in contemporary Brazilian history.” It is, once again, Don Duilio’s locution that provides us with resounding evidence of that statement. With the silences A crowded stadium that had begun with chants, shouts, and fireworks, fell silent in unison, causing a very rare effect on a soccer field. The hundred Uruguayans in the stands were either too prudent to express their euphoria, or were not enough to influence the general atmosphere. Only the Uruguayan announcer screams with an emotionality that seems to have put his heart in his mouth. Obviously he had to get on with his job no matter what happened in the stands. But what he picks up the microphone from him, in the pauses for breath, is nothing. Absolutely nothing. A silent nothing that reaches absolute silence when the game ends and he proclaims Uruguay champion for the fourth time!, and he continues speaking with his voice cracking with emotion. The stands are silent. You do not hear a fly.

The Uruguayans expected that victory as little as the Brazilians. The coach had been appointed a month earlier, and the team had been hastily reunited after a strike that had lasted two years, since 1948. Don Duilio, when announcing, yells goal, and then, as if realizing the impossibility that he is narrating, he adds “Uruguayan goal”. Minutes later, already in victory, “compatriots, I cannot deny that tears of emotion are falling to tell you with joy that we are world champions.” With interspersed silences.

The euphoric reaction that filled the streets of Montevideo and the main cities of the Oriental Republic of Uruguay before the unexpected victory, was not experienced in the same way by the players of their national team. The same thing that Don Duilio had manifested, the great damage done to the Brazilian nation, was manifested by the Uruguayan team when they cried for the sadness they found in the Brazilian streets, when they went to get drunk to bear it, and with their captain Obdulio Varela thinking about how surprised he was by the victory. “If we played that game a hundred times, we would lose it a hundred times,” he declared on the way back, in his country.

Brazilian sadness can be summed up in this paragraph from those days, which corresponds to one of the press articles that tried to find a justification for the unfair defeat. “Beating the world record for the construction of the largest stadium, breaking the world record for collection and public several times, and not achieving the world soccer record at the last moment is the great sadness that the number 12 player in Brazil – the fans – will keep forever. Many years from now, those who slept in the queues, those who fought to enter the stadium, will tell their children and grandchildren who were born after July 16, 1950 the story of a World Cup that could have been in Brazil, but what was it for Uruguay?

Today it is common that when Brazilians and Uruguayans talk, the former bring up the subject that the country of the Río de la Plata was first a Brazilian province. The Uruguayans invariably reply that they broke up in order to win the 1950 Cup.

2023-05-16 13:35:05
#maracanazo #Uruguay #independent #time

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