The collision of sports with politics has always fascinated me, so I of course read with not a little bit of attentiveness the NY Times' recent account of how Colorado Rockies catcher Yorvit Torrealba coped with the kidnapping of his son (Photo: AP).
In actuality, the story is only partly about Torrealba. It's also about what makes Venezuelan baseball players in the United States unique, and even more than that about how kidnapping for ransom is a signal that there is something very wrong with a society's foundations. For those of you thinking I might be taking things a tad out of proportion, may I point you to what is referred to in the business as the nut graf - basically the answer to the question of, "why is this article being written?" - which in this case comes later than is customary, eight paragraphs into the article:
When news of the kidnapping surfaced, it resonated with the more than 50 Venezuelans in the major leagues. Violent crime has skyrocketed this decade in Venezuela, which has the highest kidnapping rate per capita in the world (2 per 100,000), according to the country's Interior Ministry. Anyone with money is considered a mark -- and few are more public than ballplayers.
Let me now be even more blunt, and I'm aiming this directly at anyone who believes that news reflecting negatively on your belief system/politics/world view must be propaganda: kidnapping of the loved ones of professional athletes is a rare enough occurrence that we can surely presume that any time it happens would be a newsworthy event, whether immediately or after the safe return of the victim(s) in question, would we not? And given how famously well-paid athletes are in the European football leagues and the American baseball, basketball and football leagues, not to mention golf, tennis and auto racing, surely any country where kidnapping those proximate to the financially well-off is a sport in its own right would at some point target famous well-paid athletes making their dough in the world's biggest arenas, correct?
If so, then tell me, someone, please, how is it that we've never heard of Japanese baseball players dealing with their family members at home being kidnapped for ransom? Or Dominican baseball players? Or Brazilian football players? Or Eastern European basketball players?
Here's the reason: because so far, it has only happened in Venezuela. Blame the United States if you want. Blame capitalism. Why not blame Spanish colonialism while you're at it. Go ahead, point the finger somewhere else if that's what makes you feel good. None of it changes an unassailable fact: the weakness of Venezuela's societal foundations remains a serious threat to stability both within Venezuela and abroad. Focusing on short-term concerns has never yielded long-term solutions. And to the extent that the studies out there claiming that Venezuela is "solving" the poverty question are based on any notion of reality, it clearly is not happening fast enough.
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