Argentina's Maradona flies to Bolivia for charity match

BUENOS AIRES, March 16 (Xinhua) -- Argentine soccer celebrity Diego Maradona publicly chided the FIFA for barring high altitude matches as he will fly to Bolivia on Sunday for a charity game.

"I am going to seek to lend Bolivia a hand. It is not their fault if they live in Bolivia. This rule is a joke, like asking the Chinese to leave China to play soccer, or saying that the Argentines cannot play in the Monumental Stadium, or telling the Brazilians they cannot play in Rio," he said.

He also commented on a soccer-related shooting Saturday that killed Velez Sarsfield fan Emmanuel Alvarez, 21, on his way to a Velez-San Lorenzo match.

"Violence is solved by having good security," Maradona said. "Poor security is everywhere and we blame soccer. When you watch television there is a death here and other death elsewhere. Poor security is what causes pain, not a death in soccer," he insisted.

The Velez-San Lorenzo match was cancelled after Velez fans rioted on hearing the news. He said that if England, which had the worst tradition of violent fans, was able to bring peace to soccer, Argentina should be able to do so too.

Maradona and Bolivia's president Evo Morales will play in the Hernando Siles Stadium in Bolivia's administrative capital, La Paz. The match will help raise disaster relief for the 57,000 families suffering from floods in Beni, capital of northern Bolivia's Trinidad department.

Maradona, who was one of Argentina's leading goal scorers in the 1980s and 1990s, will arrive in Bolivia later on Sunday leading a team of Argentine journalists and former soccer stars including Alejandro Mancuso, Diego Latorre, Esteban Pogany and Mathias Almeyda. The rival team will be the Bolivian World Cup team which played at the 1994 World Cup in the United States.

Soccer governing body FIFA barred official international matches above 2,750 meters in May 2007. Bolivia's capital is at 3,600 meters above sea level and most of Bolivia's major cities suffer the ban.