The World Cup is a super famous sports event in competitive sports, and its influence and broadcast coverage even surpass the Olympic Games. There are two countries in history who fought bloody battles for 5 days because of “one goal” and turned the World Cup into “world misery”. These two countries are Honduras and El Salvador in Central America, and this “world sorrow” is the famous 1969 “football war”.
So why are these two countries fighting a war over a ball?
Honduras and El Salvador are located in Central America, adjacent to the north and south, and both rely on agriculture, with the cultivation of bananas, coffee, tobacco, and sugarcane as their main economic sources. The difference is that the land area of Honduras is almost five times that of El Salvador, so a lot of land in Honduras is rented by farmers in El Salvador.
Then the problem first arose in Honduras. In 1968, the Arellano regime that had just come to power in Honduras proposed that the country’s land should be allocated to its own farmers. But the problem is that at that time, many of the people who cultivated the land in Honduras were farmers in El Salvador, and many of them had lived on that land for generations. How to do? Honduras’s approach is also straightforward: expulsion!
This annoyed Salvador, whose relationship was already strained. El Salvador is richer than Honduras, but the price of its richness is that the gap between the rich and the poor has widened, and most of the land in the country is in the hands of a few landlords. There are about 300,000 Salvadoran peasants expelled from Honduras. If these 300,000 peasants are expelled back to El Salvador, the El Salvador government will also be very troubled: First, there is not so much land to distribute to them, and second, if they come back and ask for a revolution to divide the land, so what should I do now?
In this context, the relationship between the two countries has cooled down rapidly, and the media on both sides have contributed to the flames, and the smell of gunpowder has gradually filled the air. And at this moment, a fuse appeared.
At this time, it coincides with the start of the “Mexico World Cup” qualifiers. It is really a narrow road for friends. El Salvador and Honduras actually met together, and the football match became a window to vent their anger. In the first round of the qualifiers, El Salvador played away in Honduras. As a result, they were rioted by Honduras fans outside the hotel and eventually lost. In the second game, the Honduras team came to El Salvador to play. El Salvador fans directly smashed the hotel where they were staying. The Honduras team had to enter the stadium under the escort of the army and lost the game tremblingly. So far, the two countries are tied 1-1, and the final tiebreaker will be held in Mexico City, the capital of Mexico.
On June 27, 1969, the World Cup qualifier between Honduras and El Salvador began. The two teams were tied 2-2 within 90 minutes. In the final overtime, El Salvador scored a goal and won the game 3-2. . In fact, if this game is a one-sided situation, the fans may still accept it in their hearts, but after losing the game in overtime, the depressed Hondurans broke out completely. Honduran fans immediately took to the streets to make trouble, destroying all the shops and farms of El Salvador. El Salvador also expelled Honduran expatriates from the country, and the two governments announced the severance of diplomatic relations. On July 14, 1969, the government of El Salvador declared war on Honduras, and the “football war” broke out.
The war lasted for 5 days, causing about 3,000 casualties, destroying a large number of buildings and displacing more than 100,000 border residents. It was not until October 30, 1980 that the two countries signed a peace treaty, which legally ended the “football war” and handed over the territorial dispute to the International Court of Justice. The destruction of the “football war” and a series of consequences caused the economic collapse of the two countries, rampant gangsters, and become one of the most unsafe countries in the world.
