Streets fill and merrymakers partied all night, a feeling of elation filling the country. It is, I imagine, much like what Boston will be like when the Red Sox win their World Series.
On TV, cameras focused on placards on the wall of the stadium: “We could handle the Cup, We will succeed with Peace.”
In Bogotá, a city where the dormant economy hurts as much as the violence from the civil war, a soccer tournament has taken a greater importance than tired peace talks. Because, however fleetingly, in Colombia soccer heals any wound.
Robinson A. Ramirez ’02, a history concentrator in Quincy House, is associate design chair of The Crimson. He is living in Colombia and Panama this summer, musing about sports and society while conducting thesis research thanks to grants from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.