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.

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.