Boca Juniors player Sebastian Villa, during the local league match against Estudiantes, on March 13, 2022. Rodrigo Valle (Getty Images)
"Happy birthday, Sebastian!" The Boca Juniors club published this Thursday on its social networks.
Sebastián is Villa, the star of the team.
The message has generated great controversy.
Villa, born in Colombia just 26 years ago, is facing a case for rape.
The complaint, accompanied by photos, medical certificates and witnesses, was filed by an ex-partner this week and is added to another from 2020 by the woman with whom he lived, also for violence.
But the vice president and alma mater of Boca, Juan Román Riquelme, did not hesitate to defend Villa.
“We have nothing but words of thanks to this boy.
Afterwards, what happens off the pitch is another matter”, he said during an interview.
Riquelme deflected the shot and released in a single sentence some of the worst demons in Argentine football.
Villa was denounced last Friday and on Saturday he played as a starter against Racing Club.
"Rapist, rapist", they sang to him from the racinguista tribune.
In Boca, silence.
It happens that the complaint against Villa is not the only one.
The xeneize team has three other active players investigated for gender violence: Eduardo Salvio, for injuries to his ex-wife;
Cristian Pavón, for sexual abuse (in July he will leave the club due to contractual differences);
and Frank Fabra, for participating in a case of abuse against two women after a party.
The list adds the goalkeeper, Agustín Rossi, denounced by his ex-wife in 2017, before he played for Boca, and four other players who are no longer with the club: Edwin Cardona, Wilmar Barrios, Ricardo Centurión and Oscar Benítez.
The club has closed ranks around Villa, despite the sum of evidence that incriminates him.
The player feels strong.
On his birthday he was provocative on the networks.
"The wolf will always be bad if the one who tells the story is Little Red Riding Hood," he wrote.
"Despite the fact that he has no conviction, Boca should be more receptive to the complainants," says the victim's lawyer, Roberto Castillo.
“I would have expected minimal contact, to say that they are available.
It is also good to give a message to society”.
Happy birthday, Sebastian!
🎂🔵🟡🔵 pic.twitter.com/nlh86PVtaA
– Boca Juniors (@BocaJrsOficial) May 19, 2022
The fact that Villa continues to play as if nothing had happened, the same as the rest of the players denounced, opens a debate on what the clubs should do in these cases.
Of the 26 teams in the Argentine League, 14 have an action protocol for complaints of gender violence.
The first was Vélez Sarfield, in 2018, at the initiative of Patricia Ojeda, a fan of the club who is a lawyer.
"Times have changed," warns Ojeda.
“We have had situations of players that we preventively separated until their situation was resolved.
Then we work on the denounced, because eliminating violence is a cultural change”, she explains.
The challenge is not to affect the player's right to work, who has the benefit of innocence until there is a conviction.
Ojeda, however, does not agree with Boca's strategy towards Villa:
“He is not handling it with empathy towards the victim, and only the football result matters.
Villa has a track record on and off the pitch, and as an institution Boca would have to help him."
Boca boasted at the beginning of the year of having the first vice president of Argentine soccer, Adriana Bravo, who arrived with the promise of expanding the female presence in the institution.
This newspaper tried several times and by different means to contact Bravo, without success.
There was also no response from those in charge of the club's relations with the press.
Boca's only public statement was the responsibility of Riquelme.
“With the weight he has at an institutional level, you can't say that it's Villa's private life and that he's an excellent player on the pitch,” says Mariel Brito, a journalist for the
Feminacida
news site , which focuses on gender issues.
"You can not want to get involved and not get involved, but in this case it gets involved and, in addition, it justifies it," she says.
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Sebastián Villa (@sebastian14villa)
Boca has had a protocol against gender violence since 2020, promoted by a group called Feminismo Xeneize.
Mercedes Palazzo, a member of the collective, says that "football is a hard and strong core of masculinity and machismo" and that "only now are we being able to have more spaces".
“The clubs have to become aware of the social and transformational power they have.
That was forgotten, we are behind the championship and the Cup. Villa's situation would be a good opportunity to take a firm and intolerant position towards gender-based violence”, says Palazzo, in a message to the leaders of his own club.
Things have not changed as much as fans might expect.
Complaints against players are not exclusive to Boca, but its popularity magnifies both the size of the scandal and its social responsibility.
The writer Martín Kohan, a fervent bostero, as Boca fans are called, comes out in defense of the club's reputation.
And he defends that Villa continue playing because he must prevail "the principle of innocence".
"There is an overload of resonance because he is from Boca," he says.
“And lynching is deplorable.
Avoiding it is the basis of a modern criterion of justice.
Justice is not undertaken by the injured party, and that differentiates it from revenge”.
While Boca was celebrating Villa's birthday, a judge accused him of rape.
The victim's account was leaked in full detail to the press.
“He began to abuse me, hitting me a few times, and covering my mouth with his hand, at which point I scratched him a few times as a result of wanting to get out of that situation (…) But he continued to rape me and told me ‘you liked being with (… )' (saying the name of the Club partner with whom he maintained that he would have had an encounter) is that what you wanted?”, the woman told the judge.
Witnesses to the alleged abuse passed through the courts during the week.
And this Friday the testimony of the doctor who treated the young woman in a public hospital will be key.
It was she who told Villa's partner that her injuries were consistent with rape.
If she ratifies her statement before a judge,
The Colombian is Boca's most relevant player, author of key goals, such as one against River Plate in April and another in the victory against Defense and Justice, two weeks ago.
That is why he was on the field in Boca's victory against Racing Club in the semifinal of the Professional League Cup.
If there are no legal developments, Villa will also start this Sunday in the final against Tigre.
The tribune asks Villa and the leaders do not refuse, even if that means siding with the victimizer.
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