Between Bullets and Balls: The Role of Football in the Recent History of Colombia's Internal Armed Conflict

open_access
Open Access
Author:
Gutierrez Soto, Pablo
Area of Honors:
Interdisciplinary in Anthropology and History
Degree:
Bachelor of Arts
Document Type:
Thesis
Thesis Supervisors:
Christopher Hardy Heaney, Thesis Supervisor
Cathleen Denise Cahill, Thesis Honors Advisor
Douglas Warren Bird, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
Football
Sport
Conflict
Peace
Violence
Colombia
Abstract:
This thesis explores the history and anthropology of how Colombia's most popular sport, football (soccer), shaped and was shaped by the most violent period in the country's internal armed conflict from 2000 to 2016, between the Government, the paramilitary groups and the leftist guerrillas, chief of which was the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Using official documents, newspaper archives, oral histories, documents from the National Historic Memory Group and supporting literature on this period, I argue that the guerrillas and paramilitaries used and even weaponized football, using it to further their interests by capitalizing on its popularity. Football also proved crucial to the violence's de-escalation with the peace agreements signed between the government of President Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC in 2016. To explore the complexity and plurality of the armed conflict's interactions with football, I conceptualize the sport according to Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social fields, arguing that football’s objects, actors and interests were used as instruments that served each group’s objectives. Because of this appropriation and use of the sport, there was a conscious and purposeful change in how the conflict related to and reshaped the meaning of football beginning in the early 2000s. Football thereby became a political tool and a determining factor in the construction of national identity and the Colombians’ understandings of violence and peace.