Most Americans were ambivalent about Mexico's 4-0 rout of the U.S. national under-23 soccer team Tuesday, which ended the U.S. squad's hope of playing in the 2004 Summer Olympics.
It was the sound of thousands of voices chanting "Osama, Osama" in Guadalajara's Jalisco Stadium that had many U.S. citizens seeing red."I'm just a little angry," said Wisconsin resident Dick Dawson in a choleric letter to this newspaper. "If this gets widely reported in the USA, then Cancun and Ixtapa can kiss their a-- good-bye."
Similar sentiments came from Weekawken, New Jersey resident Christopher Roche, who was working in New York's City's World Trade Center when Osama Bin Laden's death-cult followers carried out the biggest terrorist strike in U.S. history.
"I will add Mexico to the list of countries that I will never visit and never spend any money in," wrote Roche.
Not just this newspaper has been bombarded with angry letters.
Francisco Solares, Sports Section coordinator for Guadalajara daily Mural, says they have received a lot of vitriolic correspondence from U.S. residents complaining about the lack of sensitivity by Mexican fans in the stadium.
Yet Solares says the Osama chants, which he first heard at U.S.-Mexico game in Guad-alajara in May 2003, should be taken with a grain of salt.
"It's reproachable, questionable and criticizable," said Solares of the Osama chant. "But it happened in a stadium, not the United Nations."
Solares says a soccer stadium is a place where people can vent, for example, the nasty things they'd love to shout at their bosses at visiting teams and the referees.
"If you were to analyze all the cochinadas that people shout at a soccer stadium, people from all sectors [of society] would be offended," said Solares, adding that there is not an anti-American sentiment in Guadalajara.
And it's not just Mexican fans who try to hit the visiting team -- and nation -- where it hurts the most.
Solares says he has been at Mexico-U.S. games in the United States where fans have held up signs reading "Remember The Alamo." That phrase, which actually refers to a Mexican victory, was used during the 1840s Mexican-American War by U.S. soldiers who eventually routed Mexico and claimed modern-day California, Arizona and Texas in the process.
The land grab still causes resentment across Mexico -- as does the U.S. national team's recent dominance of Mexico on the soccer field, which includes a humiliating 2-0 defeat in the 2002 World Cup.
"Soccer fans here, people in general, see soccer as Mexico's sport," said Juan Carlos Hernandez, a Mexican-American reporter at this newspaper. "The 2002 loss to the U.S. was seen as a loss of face, a loss of something profoundly Mexican. That's why people shouted 'Osama' at the soccer game: it was just something they used to rattle the U.S. team so Mexico could win the game."
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