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Are Military Regimes Really Belligerent? The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 62(6), 1151–1178

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El Salvador's team ahead of the deciding match against Honduras on 27 June 1969

In 1969, El Salvador and Honduras fought a four-day conflict that cost thousands of lives and displaced thousands more - a bloody struggle still remembered as the Football War.

It was 2-2 after 90 minutes at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. This was the third game between Honduras and El Salvador in as many weeks; qualification for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico was at stake, a competition neither country had ever competed in before.

Honduras won the first leg 1-0 in their capital Tegucigalpa, only for El Salvador to triumph 3-0 at home in San Salvador. Reports of violence marred both games.

As the deciding match entered the 11th minute of extra time, El Salvador's Mauricio "Pipo" Rodríguez sprinted into the penalty area to meet a cross and slid the ball past Honduran goalkeeper Jaime Varela.

"When I scored the goal, I thought it's not possible with so little time left for them to draw with us," Rodríguez says, 50 years after the critical match. "I was sure with that goal we would win."

El Salvador held on to triumph 3-2. The players hugged, shook hands, and left the pitch.

Within three weeks, their countries were at war.

El Salvador - roughly the size of Wales - had a population of about 3 million in 1969. Most of the country was controlled by a landowning elite, leaving very little space for poorer Salvadoran farmers. Honduras - similarly dominated by a small number of landowners - was five times as large, and in the same year had a population of about 2.3 million.

As a result, throughout the 20th Century, Salvadorans had been moving to Honduras to take advantage of the more available farmland, and to work for the US fruit companies which operated in the country. Roughly 300,000 were living in the neighbouring state by that year.

El Salvador's small landowning elite had supported the mass emigration, as it eased pressures on their land and calls for it to be redistributed. But the migrant arrivals caused resentment among Honduran peasants who were fighting for more land from their own elite at the time. So the Honduran government passed an agrarian land reform law to ease the tensions.

The authorities focused not on the land owned by the elites and US fruit companies however, but on lands settled by the migrants. Honduran President Oswaldo López Arellano began to deport thousands of Salvadorans home.

On top of this were simmering land and sea border disputes, including over a number of islands in the Gulf of Fonseca - a small body of water on the Pacific Coast shared between both countries and Nicaragua.

"To a very large extent this war was all about available land, too many people in too small a place, and the ruling oligarchy simply fuelling the fire in connection with the press," said Dan Hagedorn, author of The 100 Hour War, which details the conflict.

Thousands of Salvadorans left Honduras, and the government struggled to cope with the influx

Salvadoran President Fidel Sánchez Hernández's government struggled to cope with the large numbers of returning migrants, while the country's land owners began pushing for military action, and inflammatory reports about persecution and even allegations of rape and murder appeared in the newspapers.

It was in the midst of this rising anger that the countries met on the football pitch.

"There were much bigger political matters," said Ricardo Otero, a Mexican sports journalist at broadcaster Univision. "But there was this coincidence of three games to qualify for the 1970 World Cup. It didn't help. Football here [in Latin America] is very, very passionate - for good and for bad."

Honduras also interned Salvadoran migrants

"We felt we had a patriotic duty to win for El Salvador," Rodríguez said. "I think we were all afraid of losing, because in those circumstances it would have been a dishonour that followed us for the rest of our lives.

"What we didn't know was the significance of that win and the historical importance of that goal - that it would be used as a symbol of a war."

'What the heck is going on?'

On 27 June, as the players prepared for that evening's deciding game in Mexico's capital, El Salvador severed diplomatic ties with Honduras.

Interior Minister Francisco José Guerrero said close to 12,000 Salvadorans had left Honduras after the second match, with UK newspaper the Guardian reporting that he blamed "alleged persecution... stemming from an international football match".

The day after the game, US news agency UPI ran a piece with the headline "Soccer 'War' Won by El Salvador, 3-2". According to the report, 1,700 Mexican police attended the game to prevent violence and Salvadoran fans chanted "murderers, murderers" from the stands.

"People abroad stigmatised it as the goal that started the war," said Rodríguez. "The war would have happened with or without that goal."

Honduras and El Salvador both used World War II-era US-built planes during the brief war

In the days that followed, border skirmishes intensified. On 14 July, El Salvador ordered its forces to invade Honduras, and launched warplanes to bomb the country.

Mr Hagedorn, who was serving in the US Army at the time in the Panama Canal Zone, sat at a desk near to his base's teleprinter. "Whenever we would get any kind of an alert, that machine would start chattering and printing stuff out automatically, on its own," he recalled.

"I remember it vividly - it started chattering and it kept on going, kept on going. I said, 'What the heck is going on?'. So we went over and took a look at it - that's when we realised the Salvadorans had invaded Honduras."

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Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski was one of the few foreign correspondents in the area when the invasion began. By his own account, he filed some of the first reports of the conflict from Tegucigalpa that night - taking his turn to use the country's only teleprinter machine, after President López Arellano, who was communicating with his ambassador in the US about the invasion.

Kapuscinski later wrote of his time in Honduras and immortalised the conflict's name in his 1978 memoir, The Soccer War. In it, he recounts seeing graffiti saying "Nobody beats Honduras" and "We shall avenge 3-0".

By the time the Organization of American States managed to arrange a ceasefire on 18 July, it was thought about 3,000 people had died - the majority Honduran civilians. Many more were displaced by the fighting. Under international pressure, El Salvador withdrew its forces from Honduras in August.

Veterans still gather to commemorate the conflict

And the pain did not end there. Trade ceased between both nations for decades and the border was closed.

Dr Mo Hume, lecturer at the University of Glasgow, said the domestic problems in El Salvador that caused the Football War - a small landowning elite and large numbers of dispossessed farmers - would affect the country for decades to come.

"The bigger socioeconomic questions that were part and parcel of the football war were the ultimate cause of [El Salvador's] civil war from 1979 to 1992," she said. More than 70,000 people are thought to have died in the conflict.

A memorial was erected in Tegucigalpa to commemorate the war

There are still tensions between El Salvador and Honduras. Border disputes between both sides continue to this day, despite an International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling on the issue. But for the man who scored the fateful goal for El Salvador, it was not rancour that he remembered.

"For me, that goal will always be a source of sporting pride," said Rodriguez, who is now 73. "What I am sure of is that the authorities and politicians made use of our sports victory to glorify El Salvador's image."

And despite what followed, Rodriguez said the El Salvador team retained an immense "appreciation and respect" for their Honduran opponents. "Neither from the Honduras players nor from our side were the games between enemies, but between sports rivals," he said.

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Honduras v El Salvador: The football match that kicked off a war

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In 1969, EL Salvador and Honduras played three football games and then went to war. What happened?

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As a Salvadoran-American, the Football War remains very distant in our memory. It is more likely that we remember how our national soccer team beat Honduras. In the collective memory of Salvadorans, the many socioeconomic factors leading to the Football War is forgotten. Not much is remembered from the time of the military dictatorship. What is remembered is the horrifying Civil War, however study of the Salvadoran Civil War cannot be separated from study of the Football War. Many times in Latin America do military dictatorships lead a nation into a disastrous and costly war, and then a civil war follows.

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Hilariously dubbed "The Football War," this short-lived skirmish between the Central American nations of El Salvador and Honduras really characterizes the issues of the Banana Republics.

As the article mentions, both El Salvador and Honduras were controlled by a small land-owning elite. In El Salvador, this power manifested through a military regime which was loyal to the landowning class. In Honduras, the government was notoriously corrupt and worked alongside the United Fruit Company. In both El Salvador and Honduras, the peasantry migrated across the borders, almost seasonally to find work-- I am saying from first-person testimony from my family. Honduras had the benefit of having plentiful jobs, and so it was common for Salvadorans to travel for temporary work, sometimes migrating permanently.

This ultimately led to tensions between the two governments. Both governments were loyal to their ruling business elites, and the Salvadoran and Honduran elites were in competition with each other. The Salvadoran elites were primarily interested in allowing peasants to leave the country as for many decades peasants had been protesting for democratic rights and land redistribution. Allowing them to move to Honduras for work temporarily relieves this pressure on the Salvadoran elites.

However, in the eyes of the Honduran elites, an influx of migrants meant there was suddenly less land. Now the Honduran peasantry was advocating for land redistribution themselves, similarly to how the Salvadoran peasantry was pressuring the government to redistribute land in the 1930s. The solution of the Honduran government was to scapegoat the newly arrived Salvadoran migrants and deport them back to El Salvador.

In the eyes of the Salvadoran migrants, the border between Honduras and El Salvador is a slow running stream called El Rio Sumpul. It really did not make sense to the average Salvadoran peasant why either government was doing this to them. Nonetheless, both governments were now pointing fingers at each other.

In the article "Are Military Regimes Really Belligerent?" it was argued that military regimes often arise in hostile territories---a real chicken-or-the-egg situation. In the case of the Football War, both countries avoided diplomacy. In fact, diplomatic ties were quickly cut as soon as the football match in Mexico City tied. It seems as the Salvadoran military intended on pursuing the war at all costs.

In the article I read, the Salvadoran football player who scored the winning goal, Pipo Rodriguez said "People abroad stigmatised it as the goal that started the war. The war would have happened with or without that goal." I think this quote best encapsulates the politics of the military regime. The regime was already pursuing hostility and merely used the soccer match as a disguise for nationalism.

In the short term, the military regime won the war. In the long term, the military regime paid a deadly price. In the ceasefire, it was settled that the Salvadoran migrants would have to remain in El Salvador, and almost on cue the peasants began demanding democratic rights from the military regime. This culminated into the Salvadoran Civil War, where Sandinista-esque militants with popular support of the peasantry declared war on the military regime with the demand for democratic rights. The civil war raged for 12 years, deadlier than the Football War. In the end, the military dictatorship did step down, and liberal democratic rights were introduced in the country in 1992.

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A "Protest Mural" from El Salvador from the time of the Military Dictatorship

In the center, there is the image of Oscar Romero, a bishop who was assassinated by the regime for protesting against their human rights abuses. He's been immortalized as a martyr/saint in our collective memory. Importantly, the woman holding his image has white scarf, symbolizing the Mothers of the Disappeared, the civil rights organization made of women protesting the death squads and paramilitaries of the regimes.

At the top, you can vaguely see the warplanes of the Football War, which are carved as rectangles.

Below them you can see militants on the mountains. It is unclear whether there are guerrillas or paramilitaries. This image shows a timeline, as this would be clearly from the time of the Civil War.

These murals are usually very dense. I've seen many of these in El Salvador, usually in alleyways or in village centers. It was primarily how I discovered the human rights abuses of the past regime.