Mexico, Mexico | AFP | The disinformation that emerged in Mexico after the clashes between soccer fans on Saturday of last week show the population’s sense of mistrust and impunity towards the authorities, according to experts.
In the minutes after the clashes between fans in the match between the Querétaro and Atlas clubs, on matchday 9 of the Mexican league, rumors of the death of 17 people in the Corregidora stadium began to circulate on social networks, although the authorities did not They confirmed no deaths.
To date, those responsible for the state of Querétaro reported 26 people injured.
Five days after the events, last Thursday, the Querétaro prosecutor’s office indicated that 17 men had been arrested on various charges, including “attempted homicide”, violence at sports events and advocacy of crime.
While the official version was being questioned, images were also spread on networks that purported to show what had happened, although in some cases they actually illustrated past episodes of violence in soccer stadiums, as verified by the AFP verification team.
“In this event, which was very serious, what the networks were doing was inflaming the drama,” said Fernando Segura, a sociologist specializing in sports and a collaborator at the Unipol Latin American Faculty in Mexico.
“The networks [sociales] They can be used to provoke violence, attacks anonymously, or used by groups or individuals seeking to generate a hostile climate,” Segura explained to AFP.
Among the disinformation verified by AFP there are also publications on social networks that spread alleged sanctions imposed on Mexican soccer.
Users already disclosed since the day after the clashes that the country would be suspended from the Qatar World Cup-2022 and would not be able to host the 2026 tournament, as planned, two sanctions that FIFA did not announce at the moment.
Nor were other alleged punishments mentioned for national football, such as the cancellation of the league, foreseen by the competent authorities. These did impose a battery of measures for future matches, referring above all to the attendance of the fans.
In a game that was played without an audience, Querétaro visited Necaxa on Friday night at the start of matchday 10 of the Mexican league.
– Impunity and violence –
The photographs and videos of naked, bloody and unconscious bodies in the Corregidora stadium fueled skepticism about what was presented by the authorities, in a country dominated by impunity, according to the experts consulted.
By having direct testimony of what happened in the game, recorded with cell phones, the fans questioned the official versions, said Hugo Sánchez Gudiño, a doctor in Political Science and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
In Gudiño’s opinion, the distrust in the official narrative in Mexico is explained because the complaints do not prosper.
According to the report Monitoring and evaluation of the criminal justice system in Mexico, published by the civil organization México Evalúa, the impunity rate in 2020 was almost 95%.
According to the State Index of Performance of Prosecutors and Prosecutors (IEDF) 2021, prepared by the organization Impunidad Cero, the probability that a crime will be clarified in 2020 was 1%.
In Gudiño’s opinion, the slow response from civil and sports authorities, combined with questions about their lack of transparency and credibility, motivates the appearance of “another truth” in the media and social networks.
In addition, Segura said that soccer became a “sounding board” for violence in Mexico, in which the audience was a direct witness of what was happening.
“Seeing a scene of violence as harsh as the one that occurred in Querétaro, all that climate of violence translates into a series of images that make that greater sense of insecurity and violence in the country a reality,” he said.
