Earlier we had been complaining about the weather but now that we’re standing in a forever queue it suits us: 20 degrees, clouds and mild drizzle beats baking on the tarmac of the Azteca stadium car park under the burning sun.
The queue is docile, everybody’s on their phones. Probably we’re all reading the same stuff. American media have been publishing pieces like “The World Cup is here – why does nobody care?” Tickets that were supposed to be sold out remain puzzlingly available. The United States in its munificence has granted Iran the right to stay in the US the night before their games, instead of making them fly in on the day. Their benevolence did not extend to the Somalian referee who has been sent home. The image of the World Cup so far is participants submitting to frisking and searches – the Senegal team, the Uzbekistan team, Fabio Cannavaro, Kevin De Bruyne. Fifa has washed its hands, saying: “Fifa is not involved in host country immigration processes.”
It took one minute for me to pass through Mexican border control. Getting Fifa accreditation takes an hour and 45. “Don’t lose it,” they say as they hand you the plastic pass. “There are no replacements.”
Can this be true? I lost one of these accreditations during Brazil 2014, when a guy stole my bag from a hotel bar in Recife. When I went to the police station, they explained: “In Brazil, we have many ... Peruvians.” They did at least give me a police report that persuaded Fifa to print me a new accreditation.
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On the way out of the stadium you see wooden fences where graffiti has been painted over in green paint, but not quite enough of it. The phone helps translate still-visible slogans. “Mundial Del Despojo” – World Cup of Dispossession. “Hermanx – Lucha esta también es tu lucha” – Brothers/Sisters x – This is your fight too. “F**k FIFA”, “FIFA Go Home”. Those are easier.
It takes half an hour in an Uber to reach the central neighbourhood of Coyoacán via the complicated route our driver has chosen. Our destination is the house where the exiled Leon Trotsky lived and, in 1940, was assassinated. It’s now a museum dedicated to Trotsky and to the rights of asylum seekers everywhere.
Trotsky was the most famous of the political refugees who flooded from Europe to Mexico in the late 1930s. Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera allowed him to stay at their house in Coyoácan until Rivera eventually kicked Trotsky out, supposedly after he had an affair with Kahlo. Trotsky moved all of two blocks away to the house where I now stand.
The museum has pictures of Trotsky in many guises – student, poet, prisoner, revolutionary, general, family man, sportsman, intellectual. There are films of him reading out speeches – Trotsky was an early adopter of new media technologies – but somehow his expressiveness comes across better in the still photos, the range of gestures showing the passion that still animated the snowy-haired exile.
The house has been preserved as it was on the day he was murdered. The kitchen with its gas cooker and metal sink, the diningroom with its yellow tablecloth and chairs. The tiny doorways you have to duck to get through. The bedroom, with bullet holes still riddling the wall from the first, failed, assassination attempt. The study, with its big map of Mexico on the wall.
I recognise the map from one of the photos I’ve just seen in the museum. In that photo, the papers littering the table were spattered with thin sprays of blood. It was in this room that Ramón Mercader drove the sharp point of an ice axe into the back of the unsuspecting Trotsky’s head.
Victor Serge, an old comrade of Trotsky’s, was then in Marseille trying to arrange his own escape from Europe. Reading the newspaper reports of the murder, he understood immediately that Stalin had ordered the hit: “[Mercader] said he struck Trotsky in an access of indignation at the moment when the latter ‘proposed that he go to the USSR to carry out acts of sabotage’. This declaration constitutes one of the signatures on the crime, since in its flagrant absurdity it is in strict conformity with Stalin’s directives.”
Serge would live in Mexico City from 1941 until his death in 1947, aged just 56. Cut off from the world that had given their lives meaning, many of the exiles died young, or sank into depression and bitterness.
Another Coyoacán resident was Otto Rühle, a German socialist whose hatred of nazism was almost equalled in intensity by his contempt for the United States. “They’re totalitarians without knowing it,” he once ranted to Serge. “Millions of people read the Reader’s Digest, that revolting crap, intellectual nourishment of the lowest order. It kills the intelligence. Same newspapers, same radios, same soaps, same cities – it all ends up by producing standardised men who carry the totalitarianism of weak, emasculated beings in their veins ... The United States is closer than any country in the world to a totalitarianism of ants.”
In his diary, Serge wrestled with the defeat of the revolutionary cause to which he had devoted his life. “Problems no longer have the same beautiful simplicity of the past. It was easy to live on antinomies like ‘socialism or capitalism’. We are now in the midst of a total transformation of the world, in a shifting chaos, surrounded by falsifications, complex facts, uncertain ideas, transitory interests and violence. How to find one’s place?” Rühle told Serge he’d “love to live long enough to see what will happen next”. Would it console him to know how little he’s missed?
I try to go to the Museum of Anthropology, get frustrated by the traffic and the Uber driver taking another absurdly circuitous route, decide it’s too late to go there anyway, go home instead. There I read about the huge teachers’ strikes that have blocked some of the main avenues of the city.
Some junior teachers in Mexico earn as little as €330 a month and the protesters want a 13 per cent increase. Earlier a group of them had marched on the Azteca. I was gone before they arrived there, and was only vaguely aware of the strikes, which previously had been concentrated around the main square of Zócalo, miles to the north. So this is why the drivers were taking weird routes.
In the evening a colleague, David Sneyd of the42.ie, is meeting some people from Los San Patricios GAA club, for now still the only GAA club in Mexico, and I go along for some tacos. There are six people from the club, two Irish and four Mexicans.
It’s interesting to hear the Mexicans telling David about how they ended up joining a club in a sport none of them had ever heard of. The reasons all come down to the same thing: the desire for human connection. Even in a city of 25 million people, joining a team is one of the only sure ways to find friends. People speak honestly and listen respectfully. Is this what an AA meeting is like? I never thought of myself as a group therapy guy but maybe I could get into it.
We know that when you boil it right down this is what football is for – bringing people together. Even Gianni Infantino’s hashtag, #FootballUnitestheWorld, is nodding to this. Except his idea of uniting the world is getting all the richest people in the world together and charging them $1,000 for a ticket so they can post pictures of themselves there with famous influencers in the background.
Our friends from Los Patricios say that nobody they know, Irish or Mexican, has a ticket to any of the games here. There must be a lot of teachers who love El Tri, but who’s paying three month’s salary for a ticket?
Infantino sees his pricing policy as the natural order of things − if you’re not rich, then this “premium” event is simply not for you. He forgets or ignores that by doing this, he has turned the World Cup into an international symbol of exploitation and extraction. The Mexican government has accused the protesting teachers of trying to embarrass Mexico on the international stage, but if the strikes do manage to cause havoc around Thursday’s kick-off, many here in Mexico’s capital will be cheering them all the way.
