AMATEURS
The club of Finito Lopez has a special social mission
The club with an extraordinary mission
THE Lupita gym in Mexico City has a glorious past. The 54-year-old club has helped create some of the finest fighters in history. Ricardo “Finito” Lopez, a superb amateur in the early 1980s who never lost in 51 professional fights, came from the local area and was a product of the gym. Other world champions who trained there in its heyday were Carlos Zarate, Lupe Pintor, Alexis Argüello, Raúl Bernal and Bazooka Limon.
In this day and age, a host of amateur hopefuls train at the gym. But the club owner, Alberto Navarrete now has a broader ambition for the gym that his grandfather founded. “Four years ago in our 50th anniversary we had a new aim which was around having more champions but in a better world. That’s why we started thinking we had to work more around social issues,” Navarrete told Boxing News.
He invited TRASO, a charity that works towards social transformation in their community, Tacubaya, in Mexico City, and gave them a space to work in inside the building that housed the boxing gym. Later, thanks to a link through the Fight for Peace alumni network, Lupita and TRASO began working in tandem to create a social programme that used boxing. That’s how ‘Capaz’ or ‘Champions of Peace’ came about. This programme is aimed at children, seven to 11 years old, combining boxing training with training in human rights and civic values, psychosocial support (that is therapy with a pool of psychologists they use), as well as something they call ‘parent school,’ sessions that the children’s families must attend so the young people can access the free training.
“Thanks to the programme we started getting more and more involved with what is boxing and the kind of things they can achieve through boxing and be able to do social transformation through boxing in the local area,” said TRASO director Margaret Larrinaga.
It is now an award winning programme. ‘Capaz’ won the Communities Award at the inaugural Beyond Sport Mexico Awards. So successful it has been in fact that they started a comparable programme ‘Ser’ for older children in secondary school who have finished ‘Capaz’. “With this kind of group we started working in subjects like drug addiction and also youth
pregnancy,” Margaret said. “Little by little we have realised so many benefits [from boxing at Lupita]. Discipline that comes with the sport and co-ordination of the body and the mind that you have to achieve when you are training but the most important thing we realised when training with young people is the empowerment it means for young people. When we see a young person come in very shy, a young kid that may suffer violence outside or in their houses, when they just practise their first session, they come out with a totally different position, empowered, feeling more secure from the very beginning.”
“The overall aim of the programme is violence prevention, encouraging young people to be peace agents,” she continued. “Mexican reality is every day more difficult. There are so many risks for young people, not even young people living in areas like Tacubaya. All the classes as well are exposed to so many issues. I believe every young person is at risk of criminality, or consuming drugs, or prostitution, or because now even the drug dealer is the rolemodel.
“It is giving young people different tools, different options.”
In a deprived area afflicted by the problems associated with drugs, crime, gambling and poverty, what the charity offers is important, especially the lessons in personal development and transferable skills, not to mention human rights and civic duties. Their students don’t get that anywhere else in Tacubaya. “[There is] a big problem between gangs, gang issues. There are problems from gambling, gambling addiction is quite a big issue. We have a lot of violence issues, drugs are quite a big issue. There are many opportunities to work with because there are so many problems,” said Hector Colin, the project co-ordinator of ‘Capaz,’ said. “Rules are not respected at all. People just want to go over the rules. No respect for authority.”
Therefore Hector says “we work with a human rights perspective as well, civic duties. [We need to] become more civic.”
A crucial innovation in how they work stems directly from boxing in Mexico. With ‘Capaz’ the parents, the families have to be involved. “We don’t charge anything to the families, obviously it’s free to attend. The only thing we ask families is to engage with the programme, come in every two weeks and make sure the children attend,” Hector said.
Lupita’s Alberto Navarrete insisted on this. He reflected on “the importance of the examples that young people see inside their houses. So you can tell them many things outside but if they go home and they see different rolemodels, you won’t have a big impact. So I’m convinced of that, that’s why I insisted as well.”
Within the Lupita gym there are also positive rolemodels for the young people. Allan Gonzalez came to Mexico City to pursue his dream of fighting professionally. When ‘Capaz’ started, they gave him the chance to be a coach as well. “I’m so happy and so grateful to be able to teach,” Allan said. “I feel I identify with the young people I train with. I share the same kind of life, the problems that young people come with to the sessions are some problems that I faced when I was little as well. I feel that I understand them really well.”
Alberto concluded, “The history of the Lupita gym was in creating professional boxers who were world champions. Today Lupita is also making history but I believe that now it is creating a more successful story, not only in the boxing field but also in the social context. Our aim now is creating world champions in a better society.”
‘OUR AIM NOW IS CREATING WORLD CHAMPIONS IN A BETTER SOCIETY’