The story begins with a photo: the one in which the referees and captains pose before the kick-off. The protagonists, from left to right, who were there on 8 July 1990 facing the flashes and history are Diego Maradona (29 years old, blue shirt, white shorts), Colombian assistant referee Armando Perez Hoyos (38 years old, engineer, professor of a polytechnic in Medellin), referee Edgardo Codesal (39 years old, Mexican, medic gynecologist, grandson of an Argentinean), the other assistant referee, Polish Michal Listkiewicz (37 years old, gray hair, mustache) and the last one is Lothar Matthäus (29 years old, black shorts, white shirt).
The scene is known to have happened at the Olympic Stadium in Rome, converted on that day into a Munich brewery. The protagonists of that day, it is also known, will be the clumsy Sensini, the implacable Brehme, the Diego and his crying, the Moncho Monzon and his martial arts, but, above all, the protagonist will be that gentleman who commands the center of the scene: Edgardo Codesal. Logically, no one will remember that Colombian AR that is in the photo taken before the game, standing next to Maradona. Eternal hatred, bitches, rancor, everything, will take Codesal. But the truth is that a few meters from the crime scene, that is, a few meters from Sensini and Völler, there was, also as a witness, that assistant referee called Armando Perez Hoyos, the first and only Colombian in a World Cup final. He had never imagined being in the final of a World Cup: in the Campito del Departamental, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Medellin where he grew up, he was always chosen last in the pico-mount (Colombian bread and cheese). He played because he owned the ball. If someone had told him back then that he would end up in a World Cup final, he wouldn't have believed it. “That was the highlight of my career. The referee will always be the bad guy in the football movie. Our satisfactions are more personal. I remember that Dezotti even told Codesal and me that we were going to die. The same happened with Maradona. They told us everything."
The truth is that, beyond the threats of Maradona and Dezotti, it was two years before that final in Rome that Perez Hoyos was really on the verge of death. On the night of Tuesday, 1 November 1988, while he was driving with other referees to the Bogota airport, after a meeting in the Colombian AFA's Dimayor, his car was intercepted by several armed men. The other two referees were asked to get out of the vehicle, while Perez Hoyos was taken away hooded. They had him in a house, with hands and feet tied. They told him that he was there waiting for a phone call in which he would be given a message. In Colombia the “octagonal” was being played that would define the champion and it was the time of the rise of drug violence, through the Atletico Nacional of the Medellin Cartel of Pablo Escobar and of the America of the Cali Cartel of the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers. “A stranger told me by phone that the Colombian refereeing was handled very poorly. I asked him why they had chosen me and he replied that it could have been another one of the referees who had the same fate”, said Armando Perez Hoyos when he was released after more than 20 hours of captivity. He explained that he had to negotiate his freedom and that he had to agree to transmit the message: “We will get rid of the referees who whistle badly”. Perez Hoyos added “They told me that the referees should be clean" and related that the kidnappers contemptuously referred to America de Cali and Santa Fe de Bogota. The voice that spoke to him complained that these clubs frequently bought the referees and detailed that his kidnapping was the concrete result of what had happened days before, when the match between Quindio and Santa Fe had ended in a battle because of the referee, who had added too many minutes at the end. The man on the phone identified himself as a spokesperson for Atletico Nacional, Millonarios, Quindio, Pereira, Cucuta and Junior, clubs that, according to the voice, were affected by the referees. Perez Hoyos never knew whether it was Pablo Escobar who spoke to him, but he understood that he was kidnapped by the Medellin Cartel. Back then, Dimayor, through its secretary, Jorge Correa Pastrana, condemned the kidnapping of Perez Hoyos and denied the existence of a referee bribe in Colombian soccer. However, the violence continued: just a year later, after a match between Independiente de Medellin and America de Cali, the referee, Alvaro Ortega, was assassinated. This referee committed a very serious sin: two minutes before the end, he annulled a goal to Independiente (due to dangerous play), which ended up losing 3-2 against America. “That day I was next to El Patron. Escobar was very offended and ordered Chopo to find the referee Alvaro Ortega and kill him”, said John Jairo Velasquez, alias Popeye, in the documentary Los dos Escobar. Referee Alvaro Ortega was shot from a car at the exit of the Sorpresa restaurant, in Medellin, located 100 meters from the hotel where he was staying. The first shot hit him in the leg; nine others finished him off. The Colombian championship was suspended for the first time in its history and in that 1989 there was no champion.
