Author: Alfonso Nacianceno | internet@granma.cu
April 25, 2018 21:04:57
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Excessive ambition for success, fear, deceit, and contempt for human dignity spice up a contemptible practice that is now, belatedly, being punished by justice in the international arena of sport.
Sexual abuse carries enough dynamite to exploit a young man’s sporting career and traumatize him for life. The world, despite being aware of the damage, has been slow to react to these excesses and, in many countries, the desire to win is predominant in the mentality of the clubs, which silence the voices of protest inorder to avoid condemnation.
The seriousness of sexual abuse against children and adolescents from the very moment they embrace a sport exhibits painful edges, since the athlete becomes totally dependent on the designs of the coach, by exerting an influence in many cases greater than that of his parents.
The shameless take advantage of the privilege that this close relationship gives them, even when they simulate a caress accompanied by the phrase “I am the one who will lead you to victory”, creating a smokescreen that makes their pupils – who are also afraid to see their future cut short – hesitate to report having been victims of harassment.
Will they believe me or not if I go public? In this dilemma, time passes for the athlete who was subjected to such a punishment, as happened to the French athlete Isabelle Demongeot, raped by her mentor Regis de Camarat, whom she denounced when the facts had already come out, although the man was sentenced to ten years in prison for acting in the same way with two other students.
Sexual abuse does not discriminate against sports. The same thing happened to some 20 footballers in Great Britain who decided to bring to light the aggressions of coaches and headhunters, testimonies with which they accused their clubs of closing their eyes to the felonies for not seeing their successes annulled.
NASSAR, THE TRIGGER?
The 175-year prison sentence and trial of Dr. Larry Nassar, who is responsible for the health of the U.S. gymnastics team, was the biggest sex scandal in the history of world sports and was the spark that sparked a reaction in many countries.
As in most of these cases, in August 2016 the former gymnast Rachel Denhollander, and later the Olympic medalist in the same discipline, Jamie Dantzscher, took the initiative and exposed the predator Nassar.
Influenced or not by what is known about the case in the United States, on Wednesday Gerardo Werthein, president of the Argentine Olympic Committee (COA), asked to denounce sexual abuse before the courts.
“It’s a really severe issue and one that attacks sport in the world. I tell my fellow leaders not to keep things under the rug, to take responsibility,” said a concerned Werthein, who is also the head of the Organizing Committee for the 2018 Buenos Aires Youth Olympic Games.
On April 3, the COA brought to justice a coach from the national teams of the Argentine Gymnastics Confederation, a sexual abuser of some athletes in the 1990s.
Earlier this week, Granma published the decision by Australian sporting authorities to stop the infamous practice of abusing athletes, a report that revealed that in 2012, an investigation revealed that more than 4,000 government institutions (including 344 sports institutions) had been charged with child sexual abuse.
It does not matter whether or not the Nassar case was the trigger for justice in the world. Hopefully, the number of countries on the same path will grow, because the planet and the international sports movement will be hurt by doping, the theft of talent from poor nations and commercialisation. Fighting back, better late than never.
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Under the pseudonym “General Secretariat of the Organization of American States”, the United States Ministry of Colonies issued a press release with which it once again stripped itself naked.
The current Secretary General of the OAS is a sordid traitor to his Uruguayan homeland. Having carried out important political tasks in his country of origin under the presidency of José Mujica – a highly respected personality who is the pride of Latin America – the Secretary General threw his buttocks into the arms of the empire and today exercises the saddest role that a Latin American could play.
Luis Almagro, who was a member of the Frente Amplio, a prestigious unitary political group in Uruguay that provided the Uruguayan people with an efficient political weapon for achieving notable victories at the polls. Almagro has dealt a harsh blow to the popular aspirations of Latin America with his embarrassing performance at the OAS. He has undermined the democratic prestige of his own nation of origin like no one else since the period of the military dictatorships.
In judicial proceedings for petty thieves and other minor crimes that in themselves denounce the misery that led him to betrayal, Luis Almagro intends to continue providing services to the empire with attacks on Cuba, Venezuela and everything that hinders U.S. hegemony in the hemisphere.
Cuba has just carried out an electoral process for presidential continuity that is a paradigm of real democracy and the full exercise of its people’s sovereignty. This well-paid servant of imperialism claims that “the election by the Cuban National Assembly of Miguel Díaz-Canel as President of the country has taken place without the free expression of the Cuban people”.
Almagro cannot ignore that it is precisely the electoral systems of the hemisphere – especially the United States, which claims to be the model from which the rules and patterns for others flow – that the peoples of the “representative democracies” that Washington has spread across the continent most strongly object to as its sardonic “Manifest Destiny”.
The legal system of the latter constitutes the ideal scenario for an unjust order of unequal exchange, exploitation and misery. Washington considers itself called upon to impose this on the world, in accordance with the US philosophy that seeks to justify the way in which the elites of some countries concentrate wealth while submitting to the dictates of the imperialist metropolis.
“Manifest Destiny”, which expresses the belief that America is destined by providence to expand to the four winds, is a racist doctrine. It considers white Americans superior to the mestizos of neighboring countries south of its border who must be regenerated. It assumes that God chose the American people to be, as a political and economic power, a nation superior to the rest of the world, and connects this with the Monroe Doctrine of “America for the Americans.”
When in so many countries on the continent, including the United States, opponents and dissidents are imprisoned and tortured, people are discriminated against on the basis of race, gender, age and nationality; freedom of expression is limited to those who have enough moneyy to exercise it. Selective deaths are ordered and carried out for political reasons by gangs manipulated by capital. Those who demand the right to organize, to better wages, to study and to work are cruelly repressed. The security of the population is undermined by the sale and proliferation of firearms in society by merchants who bribe unscrupulous politicians with impunity.
The U.S. colonial minister has tried, with as much indignity as he can imagine, in order to carry out the will of Washington and Wall Street against the progressive governments that several peoples of the hemisphere have managed to install on the basis of a united patriotic struggle.
Almagro attributes to the OAS the function of denouncing and working for a hemisphere free of dictatorships, with very peculiar selectivity. As a result of the intervention of criminal groups in a citizens’ protest against an increase in social security contributions, an unusual wave of violence broke out in Nicaragua. A dozen were left dead and many injured in that country, which is considered the most peaceful and safe in Central America. The OAS immediately “demanded” Daniel Ortega’s progressive government not act against “peaceful demonstrations” and the country was subjected to a terrorist methodology similar to the guarimbas promoted and financed by Washington’s anti-Chavism in Venezuela, both in 2014 and 2017.
The diligence with which the OAS acted there contrasts with the laziness it showed when, recently, it was asked to act in Honduras in the face of dozens of crimes committed by the repressive forces of the local regime… and to which the OAS never responded.
April 26, 2018.
You must be logged in to post a comment.