Shadow Of Shame

Even Maturana and the national team haven't been immune. Hernán Darío Gómez, Nacional's coach, succeeded Maturana as national coach until a barrage of death threats made it clear that he should step aside. Gómez became an assistant coach, and Maturana, who says this World Cup is definitely his last, agreed to come back.

One of the DEA's most trusted informants, a former mid-level money launderer for the Cali cartel who uses the alias William Soto, says he took part in soccer games between private teams owned by cartel leaders and featuring pro players. At stake? Two hundred kilos of cocaine. But, Soto says, none of those games involved players from this year's national team. Rather, the strongest link between the Cali cartel and soccer may now be the use of the América club by Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela (a former team president) and his brother Gilberto as a vehicle for laundering cash. "Everything América has belongs to [Miguel]," Soto says. "The gym, the facilities, everything. Everything is cartel."

Everything, it seems, except Maturana, who has walked as narrow a tightrope as there is in Colombia while coaching Nacional from 1987 to '90, when Escobar was at the height of his power, and then, after a year in Spain, coaching América the last three years. "Everything about Medellín is connected to drug trafficking," Maturana says. "So it was with soccer. But I never had trouble; I never went with Escobar or those guys." He got a glimpse of the system, though. Before he coached National to Colombia's first international championship, in the '89 Liberators' Cup, Maturana says, a man offered him 10 million pesos if the team won. Maturana refused the tip. "I'm a public figure," he says. "I'm very careful where I go, very selective with my friends. If I ever had an approach...I'd say no."

Apparently the Cali bosses have no desire to ask. Maturana's success has made him untouchable. "They respect him," says Soto. "I was at a meeting when [the drug lords] talked about trying to get him involved, but Maturana is so valuable as a coach that they don't want to hurt him. These guys put machine guns to people's heads. But they have so much respect for Maturana that when he broke off from Pablo Escobar [at National] to go to Miguel Rodríguez [at América], it was no problem. And he can go back to National tomorrow, no problem."

Maturana's appeal runs so deep that he was a fringe figure in an episode that sums up political life in Colombia. In 1985 a left-wing guerrilla group called M-19 invaded the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, burned records and killed 11 Supreme Court judges before being violently dislodged by the army. But in '91, after M-19 was granted a full pardon, its top strategist, who was not present at the Palace massacre, was elected to lead a convention that rewrote Colombia's constitution—a rehabilitation equivalent to Lee Harvey Oswald's being voted into the U.S. Senate. Literary critics call the brilliant fiction of García Márquez "magic realism." But in Colombia, says a bemused U.S. embassy staffer, "magic realism is everyday life."

Which may be the only explanation for what happened with M-19 and Maturana in 1991. Looking for legitimacy, the former outlaw group chose the coach as one of its delegates to the constitutional convention. Because he was working in Spain, Maturana was unable to attend the convention, but he said he was honored by the nomination. "People saw his name and voted him in," Bellini says. "He's an idol."

Mostly because he wins. In its last 34 international contests as of last Friday, Colombia had lost only once. In addition to that, the 45-year-old Maturana pushed an idea that had gnawed at him since he was a player in the 1970s and '80s: soccer nationalism.

Since the 1950s Colombian teams had imported talent and coaches from Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, and with them came those countries' tactics and tendencies. "When we went to Argentina, we looked like Argentines," Maturana says. "It was like looking in the mirror." And if the Colombians weren't aping the defensive, physical pride of the pampas, they were imitating the speedy European style—even though the Colombian players had never been known for fleetness.

Maturana insisted that Colombians play like Colombians. He encouraged individual flair, discipline, a short passing game. Most radically, he parlayed Higuita's talent with both his hands and his feet into what is now a Colombian institution—the goalie who doubles as a sweeper. The strategy is entirely dependent on instinct: When the keeper feels that a forward rush by him can overwhelm the defense, he goes. As the game with Cameroon in 1990 showed, it's a dangerous tactic. But Maturana believes that the freewheeling goalie expresses the Colombian soul: aggressive, creative, forever teetering between triumph and disaster.

With a talent-rich team and the more cautious Córdoba in the goal, Maturana might now be proved a genius. But when he first took over National—and simultaneously the national team—in 1987, few people believed he could build a world power by celebrating Colombian qualities. That he was able to do it is due in large measure to the man behind Nacional, the man who, when other teams were still winning with foreign talent, endorsed Maturana by establishing a simple rule: Nacional wins or loses only with Colombian players. By winning the Liberators' Cup in '89, Nacional proved that Colombians could play with anyone in South America. Then, in December of that year, in Tokyo, Nacional took Italian powerhouse A.C. Milan to the final minute of overtime before losing. That told Colombians what they had been waiting to hear: Colombia could play with the world.