Fernando Cáceres shot

Fernando Cáceres

Early on Sunday morning, violence once again reared its head in the world of Argentine football, when Fernando Cáceres – Independiente’s reserve team coach and a former Argentina international – was shot by robbers, taking a bullet in his right eye. At the time of writing, he continues in the Carrillo Hospital in Ciudadela Doctor Rodrigo Bau informed the press that, ‘the patient arrived in a coma.’

Cáceres played for Argentinos Juniors and for both River Plate and Boca Juniors, as well as Spanish sides Real Zaragoza, Valencia, Celta de Vigo and Córdoba, spending the 2005-2006 season with Independiente before ending his career where it had started, at Argentinos, the following season. He featured on 24 occasions for the selección, including the campaign for the senior side’s last trophy, the 1993 Copa América in Ecuador.

Four men approached Cáceres’s car with the seeming intention to rob him, and ended up shooting him in the eye. Bau clarified; ‘[the bullet entered] the right eyeball and there is no exit wound… we have to wait and see what happens in the operating theatre.’ What eventually happened was that the operation finished without the surgeons being able to extract the bullet. Three of the assailants have already been identified.