The Long Read: The Nacional Stadium Disaster of 1964 and Peru's complex political history

It was one of the worst football stadium disasters of all-time, but what happened in Lima in 1964 was about much more than just football.

Hillsborough, Heysel, Chapecoense, Il Grande Torino, The Busby Babes. The history of football is pock-marked with tragedy, both on and off the pitch.

But perhaps the worst disaster of them all came at the Estadio Nacional de Peru in Lima on the 24th May 1964. To fully understand this tragedy, where it came from, and why it remains shrouded in mystery even in Peru to this very day, is to have to understand some of the changes that swept through the country throughout its tumultuous 20th century political history.

In short, the common knowledge version of what happened that day goes something like this. Peru were drawn at home to play Argentina in a crucial qualifying match for that year's Olympic Games. They went into the game requiring a draw to ease their passage to Tokyo but were trailing when, with a few minutes of the game left to play, what would have been a Peruvian equaliser was disallowed, a decision which resulted in a pitch invasion, tear gas being fired by the police, and ultimately a stampede and crush that killed—officially, at least—328 people.

All of this is true, but there's much more to it as well. In May 1964, there was a feeling that Peru were a team on the rise. They'd only entered the World Cup qualifiers for the first time in 1958, but they had qualified for the 1960 Olympic Games, where they were beaten by France and Hungary, before winning their final match against India.

Their qualifying position for the 1964 games was reasonably good. They needed a point from their penultimate match against Argentina, with Brazil still to play in their final match. A capacity crowd of 53,000 turned out at the Estadio Nacional for the match.

But despite recent performances their opponents were still strong opponents and Argentina took the lead. And time was running out, when a cross led to a 50-50 challenge between Peru's Kilo Lobaton and an Argentinian defender, which resulted in the ball bouncing into the back of the goal. Uruguayan referee Angel Eduardo Pazos, however, had other ideas, and disallowed the goal.

There was already a perception of bias on the part of the referee among the Peruvian crowd on account of Uruguay's close proximity to Argentina, and many of those in attendance were enraged by his decision to disallow the goal. A local bouncer by the name of Bomba, by contemporary reports well-known, invaded the pitch to attack the referee and was stopped by riot police before being roughly manhandled from the pitch. A second pitch invader, one Edilberto Cuenca, turned out to be less fortunate. He was taken to the side of the pitch and beaten by the police, who also set their dogs on him.

This occurred, of course, in full view of an already furious crowd, who responded to this by launching a barrage of missiles at the growing riot police presence around the stadium. Their response was to fire tear gas canisters into the stands. The stadium was still almost full, and the stampede that followed was a result of cold, blind panic.

Thousands fled for the exit, but there was a problem. One was still locked. Rather than standard gates, the Estadio Nacional had solid corrugated steel shutters at the bottom of tunnels that connected to street level, but why these shutters were closed with just six minutes of the match left to play is not a question that has ever been satisfactorily answered by the authorities.

As people reached the bottom of the tunnels, there was nowhere for them to go. As the crowd built up as a result of the locked gate, and an initial reluctance on the part of those who'd made it that far not to go back into the chaos behind them, people began to asphyxiate. Eventually, under the weight of bodies piling up against it, the gate burst open.

Rioting continued across the city into the night. And here's one of the problems with our understanding of what happened that day. The number of dead officially given only counts those who died from asphyxiation or other crushing-related damage inside the stadium itself, and it is almost certain that that is an understatement.

No one knows exactly how many people were killed that night in total, although contemporary reports believe that it may have been as high as 500 or perhaps even more. It has been claimed that the police switched quickly from tear gas to live ammunition, and that there was a high chance that the police killed plenty more people than has ever been publicly acknowledged. There was a cover-up which began very quickly after things began to spiral out of hand. Furthermore, the lack of detail over the rioting mirrors a lack of political will in Peru to ever fully address what happened that day.

The rioting which took place after the initial tragedy was certainly serious. There were further encounters between a mixture of political activists, angry supporters and the riot police, which ran until late into the evening. Houses, a betting shop and a Goodyear tyre factory were all set alight by rioters, while there was also a mass break-out at a local prison, and at least 100 cars were stolen.

It is astonishing to think that it is still not known exactly how many people were killed as a result of this horrific sequence of events more than half a century after they first took place, and the disaster remains best remembered as a football stadium disaster, rather than what happened afterwards across the entire city and beyond.

So did this come to pass? One thing that seems clear is that events unravelled at the Estadio Nacional that day with an almost unseemly haste. So quick, it might be argued, as to make tragedy inevitable from the moment that the riot police started firing tear gas canisters into the crowds.

To understand the background behind this requires an understanding of Peru's frequently volatile political culture. It had certainly been a turbulent couple of years in the country, from a political perspective, but this was nothing new.

The Republic of Peru was created in 1824, but it took until the end of the 19th century before a period of relative stability came about. The aristocratic republic, so-called because so many of the presidents of the era came from Peru’s social elite, lasted until the tremors of the Wall Street crash of 1929 started to rumble through the Peruvian economy.

The political system cleaved apart, with the Peruvian Socialist Party and the APRA, a populist centre-left party, emerging as the two biggest parties. The APRA was heavily repressed throughout the 1930s, but Peru went through a period of several governments, both democratically elected and military, over the next three decades.

In 1962, a victory for APRA was halted after they failed to quite reach the one -third percentage of the vote required to be able to form a government. The new government was overthrown immediately by a military junta led by Ricardo Pérez Godoy. On the 18th July 1962, on a single pledge to oversee new elections, the government was forced to withdraw from the elections the following year.

By the start of 1963, Godoy was starting to show signs of wanting to outstay his welcome, and he in turn was replaced by Nicolás Lindley López in the March of that year on a promise of holding elections in July swiftly reinstated, albeit with APRA's claim to the 1962 election win being swiftly forgotten. The re-run that summer saw a convincing victory for Fernando Belaúnde, who was running for the presidency with the backing of the reformist Acción Popular and the populist Christian Democrat parties.

It is understandable, therefore, that tensions would have been high in the build-up to this match for reasons that were nothing whatsoever to do with football. The centre-left party might not quite have got the one-third that they needed to secure the ability to form the country's next government, but they did get the highest proportion of the vote, and its opportunity to form that government was snatched away by the military.

Under such circumstances, it might be argued, it's small wonder that this particular match, played less than a year after the 1963 general election, was played in a febrile atmosphere. Official obfuscation surrounding the number of people killed that day certainly hasn't helped governments in Peru to seem that trustworthy. There is plenty of eyewitness evidence to suggest that people were killed by gunshot wounds from shots fired by armed police.

The judge who was appointed to investigate what had happened that day, Benjamín Castañeda, later told the BBC's Piers Edwards in an interview that he arrived at a hospital in Lima having been told that there were people dead from gunshot wounds, only to be further told that bodies were already being moved from the hospital.

He concluded that the official death toll of 328 did not reflect the true number of victims, since there were well-founded suspicions of a secret removals of those killed by bullets, before accusing a government minister of provoking the violence in order to justify a broader law and order crackdown.

Only two people were ever reprimanded over the events of the 24th May 1964, Jorge Azambuja, the police commander who ordered the firing of tear gas into the crowd, was imprisoned for two and a half years. The other, you'll be completely unsurprised to hear, was Benjamín Castañeda, who was fined for filing his report six months late and for failing to attend the autopsies of all 328 of the asphyxiation victims. His report was unsurprisingly rejected by the government.

But the government of Fernando Belaunde didn't last that long either. Belaunde had acted quickly upon becoming President, investing heavily and improving social security payments. But on the economy he wasn't as strong, and in 1967 the Peruvian currency, the Sol, had to be devalued.

A year later, following widespread anger at his decision to pay the Standard Oil Company compensation for handing over two lucrative oil fields, he was ousted in a military coup and replaced by Juan Velasco Alvarado, a left-wing military general. Alvarado ran the country as a dictatorship for the next seven years before, already effectively immobilised by ill health, he in turn was ousted in a military coup, and democratic elections returned to the country in 1978. Belaunde even returned for a second spell as President in 1980.

As always in football, the show kept marching on. With Argentina having already qualified, Brazil beat Peru 4-0 to qualify for that summer's Olympic Games tournament in Tokyo, at which the gold medal was claimed by Hungary, with Czechoslovakia claiming the silver medal and East Germany the bronze.

Brazil, who qualified at the expense of Peru, had a very unusual tournament. They were denied a win in their opening match against the United Arab Emirates by an 88th-minute equaliser. However, after they won their second match against South Korea 4-0, they witnessed the UAE put ten goals past them without reply. In the final round of group matches two days later, they lost to the eventual winners Czechoslovakia to seal an early elimination from the tournament. The Brazil team of the 1964 Olympic Games wasn't the team of Vava, Garrincha and Pelé, but this was still a major surprise.

For Peru, however, a period of substantial growth in the history of the game in the country shuddered to a halt with the 1964 disaster. Olympic qualification is taken considerably more seriously in South America than in Europe. Their qualification in 1960 had only been their second. Their first, in Berlin in 1936, had ended in acrimony after a controversial match against Austria which led to their expulsion from the tournament. After having won the match 4-2 in Berlin, complaints were made to FIFA by the Austrian team, claiming that Peruvian players had manhandled the Austrian players and that spectators, one holding a rifle, had swarmed down onto the field during the match.

The IOC demanded that the match be replayed behind closed doors, so Peru withdrew their entire team from that games, along with Colombia, who joined them in protest. Further expressions of support came from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Mexico. There were angry protests at the German consulate in Lima at perceived interference from the German Reich on behalf of Austria, with Oscar Benavidez Larrea, the president of the country at the time, describing the decision of the IOC to demand a rematch as the “Crafty Berlin decision”.

Qualification for the 1960 Olympic Games had, therefore, been something of a vindication for Peru on more than one front, quite aside from feeding into the feeling, swollen by winning the Copa America in both 1953 and 1957, that this was a team on the rise. But proved to be a high watermark in terms of the Peru national football team at the Olympics. They haven't qualified for a men's Olympic football tournament since.

The World Cup proved to be more fertile ground. They'd entered the first tournament in 1930, losing their first match against Romania 3-1 in front of just 300 people, the smallest crowd ever to attend a World Cup Finals match, while also becoming the first team to have a player sent off in the match at the World Cup Finals. The team then had to play in the World Cup Finals before losing narrowly to the eventual champions Uruguay in their other group match in Montevideo.

Qualification for the finals in 1970 began at the beginning of something of a golden age for the team. That year they lost to Brazil in the quarter-finals after having beaten Bulgaria and Morocco in the group stages before losing against West Germany.

Eight years later in Argentina, they defeated Scotland and Iran in the group stages, scoring against the Netherlands to qualify for the second group stage, where they lost to Brazil, Poland and Argentina, the latter in a match heavily suspected to have been rigged to give a misfiring host nation the gold difference they needed to qualify for the final of the competition. In Spain in 1982, they drew with Italy and Cameroon before getting thrashed by Poland in their final group match to be eliminated from the tournament at the first hurdle.

This turned out to be the end of the golden era for the national team in Peru. It would take until 2018 for them to qualify for the World Cup Finals for a fourth time, and in 2018 they couldn't get through the group stages again, losing by an odd goal to both Denmark and France before beating Australia in their final match.

Following the disaster of 1964, the Peruvian government declared a seven-day period of mourning for those that had died, while national flags were flown to the streets of the country. The national demonstration was postponed at half-mast, and all public engagements were cancelled. A decision was taken to reduce the capacity of the Estadio Nacional to 42,000 people, and it has been renovated several times since then.

To get a sense of the Estadio Nacional disaster, though, we need to consider that even if we had to stick to the official death toll of 328 people, the number of people killed that day was still 38 more than lost their lives at Hillsborough, Burnden Park in 1946, the Bradford Fire, Heysel and during the 1971 Ibrox disaster, all combined.

But more than half a century on, we still don't know the exact number of people who died, both indirectly and directly, as a result of football's worst ever tragedy. Meanwhile, political instability has continued in Peru ever since, with the corruption of Alberto Fujimori, who was subsequently convicted of both human rights abuses and embezzlement.

As recently as 2016, centre-right president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned over vote bribery after just two years in charge of the country, and Peru remains a politically volatile place to this day. Kuczynski had already given an official pardon to Fujimori for his crimes committed in Peru, a decision which caused protests across the country, and survivors of the crime were not able to escape the prison.

He was sentenced to 25 years in prison, with one attempt at impeachment prior to his resignation. And all of this came within two years. He spent years in prison, campaigning for his release. Alberto Fujimori never acknowledged most of the crimes for which he was sentenced, to 25 years. The former president always claimed his innocence for the murders and disappearances by a government-sanctioned death squad. Critics say this government was the most corrupt in Peruvian history.

His supporters credit the 79 year-old former leader with the defeat of Shining Path rebels in the 1990s. Peruvians were at the cusp of an armed conflict that killed thousands of people. Supporters also say Fujimori helped save the economy from collapse. For years, his children campaigned for his release, saying he was ill and frail. But Fujimori didn't have a terminal illness, a condition for a humanitarian pardon. President Alan Garciano and Anta Humala denied him the right to resign. The president said he didn’t want to resign, but that he was willing to do so anyway.

Club football has been tainted by tragedy in Peru as well. League football has been played there since 1912, a full decade before their National Football Federation was even founded. And it has long been dominated by three clubs. Universitario. Alianza Lima and Sporting Cristal. These three clubs have won 68 Peruvian League championships, with Universitario having won 26, Alianza 23, and Sporting 19. Universitario reached the final of the 1972 Copa Libertadores, and Sporting Cristal did the same in 1997. All three clubs are, of course, based in the capital city.

On the 7th January 1987, Allianza were top of the Primera División when they travelled to play Deportivo Pucallpa in a league match. They won that match 2-0 and had a chartered flight, a Fokker F27 plane leased from the Peruvian Navy, to return them to the capital city afterwards. But as they approached the airport, the pilot was troubled by a faulty indicator and requested visual confirmation from the control.

The plane flew out to turn around and come back to land, but it never did. It crashed into the Pacific Ocean, six miles out from the coast. Forty-three people, including the entire Alianza team and coaching squad, were killed. One player, Alfredo Tomasini, is known to have survived the initial impact, but to have subsequently drowned. Only the pilot, who was inexperienced in flying at night and had only logged over five hours in this type of plane in the previous three months, survived. The Navy carried out an investigation into the crash, but kept its findings strictly secret. Independent investigations were also banned.

There were huge and violent protests against this secrecy across the country, with the most common rumour being that the Navy was covering up the terrible maintenance record of its air fleet. Accidents were reported in the air force, but no one was hurt. The pilots were also told that accidents had been frequent beforehand, and their poor condition was an open secret.

It wasn't until 2006, after 19 years in a safe in Florida, that the results of the investigation were finally reported by a television news broadcast. The investigation cited the pilot's lack of night flying experience, his misreading of the emergency procedures related to the landing gear issue, and the aircraft's poor general mechanical condition, as the causes of the crash.

Unsurprisingly, Alianza Lima didn't win the league title that season. The following season they were almost relegated, and they didn't win the Primera División again until 1997. This time it was a club that was let down by an institution which apparently existed primarily to look after its best interests.

Placed within the political culture of Peru though, it makes perfect sense. But whether we like it or not, football and politics do intertwine. Such is the way of the world. There's plenty of evidence confirming a government cover-up of the scale of the 1964 Estadio Nacional disaster, and it seems unlikely that such rioting and violence could be born of football-related anger alone.

All we know for sure is that the Peruvian state let its people down in 1964 in providing an unscathed facility and a police force with a hair-trigger temper. In 1987, the Navy provided ill-suited pilots and a defective aeroplane to one of the country's most lauded football clubs, and then hid the fact that it did so for almost 20 years. It should come as little surprise to us, really, that a culture of political violence such as this might breed similar cultures of violence elsewhere.