The World Cup and Tomorrow's Election

The World Cup has started and, by God’s mercy, will end the Sunday before the coming semester starts here at the Biblical Seminary of Colombia. I love soccer and all, and I am glad to have the chance to watch some great matches, but as one of my friends recently noted, the productivity of the world will substantially drop in the next few weeks. So, I’m glad students can get this out of their system before hitting the ground running on the academic year. (My productivity, on the other hand, needs to be quite high before the semester begins, so I’m not sure how many games I’ll be able to watch.)

Colombia made their World Cup debut today by trouncing Greece 3-0. It’s the first time that the selección (national team) has made the World Cup in 16 years, and the country is proud of it. In the few taxi rides I’ve been on in the last couple of weeks, the preferred topics of conversation usually revolve around two things: prospects for the World Cup and how amazingly awesome Medellín is as a city. While patriotic spirit runs high during national soccer matches, I’ve noticed a certain level of hesitancy among those I’ve spoken with. Colombia has easier than average group stage competition, but the best player on the team, Falcao, is out with a knee injury. I’ve also heard a lot of Colombians comment on how good of a team the United States has, something I’m certainly not used to hearing. But they did do quite well in qualifying, and at least the non-so-heavy-hitters in Latin American soccer have taken note. Not that that will probably enable them to advance out of group competition, given their competition of Germany, Portugal, and Ghana.

I didn’t get to watch the Colombia-Greece game, but even if I hadn’t been following sporadically online, I could have predicted the score pretty accurately by listening to my surroundings. Three distinct uproars of applause from the neighbors with the requisite honking of horns by cars and busses alerted me to each of Colombia’s three goals. Lack of any clear wailing sounds suggested Greece had probably not been able to match that performance.

Colombia is a nation that loves to party, as is pretty much true of all of Latin America. So, I find it ironic but amusing that after such a decisive reappearance on the World Cup scene, 6:00 p.m. tonight begins a 36 hour ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol in the country. What could account for this temporary ban? Tomorrow’s presidential election runoff. In the interests of minimizing confrontations, they attempt to enforce sobriety from the evening before the election to the morning after. Not that I expect this to actually produce the intended effect, but it’s certainly not a bad idea to try to improve things.

I went shopping this afternoon at a nearby grocery store and they were repeatedly announcing the ban on liquor sales starting at 6:00. But, until then they were offering some discounts. Probably a quarter of the shoppers in the store wore Colombian national team jerseys, certainly a far greater unifying force than anything the presidential elections have had to offer. Let’s pray that whatever the outcome tomorrow, people will accept the results peacefully and that somehow Colombia will find a way to bring the armed conflict to an end through a just and reconciling peace. I don’t see any easy way for that to happen, so all I can do is pray.