The myth in England is that the shanty town on the outskirts of Buenos Aires where Manchester City striker Carlos Tevez hails from is so tough it makes Maradona’s shanty town look like Buckingham Palace. Friends in BA turned pale when I said I wanted to go to Fuerte Apache to see the huge mural to Tevez painted a few months ago.
When you reach Fuerte Apache, you see is not a shanty town at all, but a huge housing estate. As I and a friend from the BA street paper, Hecho en BsAs, stand nervously on the edge, trying not to look conspicuous, it certainly looks like a fortress: very rough, very decrepit, lots of rubbish, burnt out cars, dodgy drains, and a lot of very poor people (population 100,000) hanging around.
However, myths fade in bright sunshine, and as we walk gingerly in, the blocks are not grey monoliths like a UK sink estate but uneven, quite higgledy-piggledly, some 12 floors, some two-storey, squares of grass, flowering trees, hibiscus and bougainvillea here and there. And as we ask the way to the mural, people are not hostile and suspicious as we were warned they would be, but friendly, even helpful.
We reach the 30 metre-high mural painted on the side of the block where Tevez was born. It is mesmeric. We sit watching it, having a beer in the scruffy bar opposite. Blokes in there seem glad that outsiders (especially a Mancunian) are interested in their ‘favourite son’. They ask what fans think of him. I say they like his toughness and how he puts his heart and soul into the game. You need to be tough here, they say.
A fantastic smell of grilled meat wafts our way, and we walk on to the parrilla in a little square, owned by Don Benito who famously asked Tevez to ‘pay up for the sandwiches he owed’ when he started making his millions. As we eat steak and chips, we remark that the Buenos Aires newspapers say Tevez is always coming back home, but in this bar they say they haven’t seen him for years. He bought houses for all his family and they naturally moved out. However, his brothers still support the nearby Fuerte Apache kids’ football club and this is where the Tevez effect is most visible.
The pitch where Tevez first kicked a ball about is no longer a dirt patch but a bright new green astro-turf, with fencing round it and spectators benches. It was built two years ago with money from BA provincial Governor Scioli’s office. ‘Didi’, the long time trainer who ‘discovered’ Tevez and other players now in the Argentine leagues, is justifiably proud of his ‘seedbed’. The club is like a second home for 90 kids, many of them from families plagued by the social problems rife on the estate: unemployment, illiteracy, drugs, and crime. As well as football skills, he aims to teach social skills and all the other qualities involved in being in a team. In ‘Didi’ has four teams of boys from five to fourteen which play in various local youth leagues. On Saturdays, there are competitions and the standard is so high that spectators are even charged, to raise funds for a canteen to improve the kids’ diet.
Fuerte Apache may have its fair share of heavy criminals (including one of the infamous Twelve Apostles gang), delinquents, bovver boys, and wife beaters, but we didn’t meet any. We were even told ‘it’s safer to live here than fancy Palermo Hollywood’. Anyway, instead of the furtive in and out visit we planned, we stayed for five hours, had a whale of a time, and were even invited back for an asado.
