Violence & Brawls ·
The People Caught in the “Soccer War”
In 1969, violent World Cup qualifiers accompanied a crisis over Salvadorans living in Honduras. Expulsions and attacks preceded El Salvador’s invasion.
On July 14, 1969, El Salvador’s air force attacked targets in Honduras, and its army crossed the border. The countries had recently faced each other in World Cup qualifying matches marked by harassment and violence. But the people caught between them included Salvadorans who had lived and worked in Honduras for years. Edward M. Rowell, a political adviser in Honduras at the time, later recalled that the Salvadoran government launched the war “to protect its citizens in Honduras.”
Land and work had drawn Salvadorans across the border long before the matches. El Salvador had a large, growing population and little available land; Honduras was larger and more sparsely populated. Many migrants settled on land without legal title. In early 1969, the Honduran government invoked an agrarian reform law to evict Salvadoran squatters and expel them. Stories and images of displaced people filled Salvadoran newspapers and broadcasts.
The football encounters brought another round of confrontations. Honduras won the first match, in Tegucigalpa on June 8, 1–0. El Salvador won the return match in San Salvador on June 15, 3–0. Jack R. Binns, who worked at the U.S. Embassy in Honduras, recalled Salvadorans screaming through the night outside the visiting team’s hotel to keep the players awake. Rowell described people firing shotguns and rifles through buses carrying Honduran football visitors, followed by a riot at the stadium.
In later oral-history interviews, both men described attacks on Salvadorans in Honduras. Binns recalled people being dragged from their homes, beaten and driven from their jobs, and asserted that the Honduran government had sanctioned the mob actions. Rowell remembered shops being ransacked after word of the violence in El Salvador spread, but did not claim to know who set the violence in motion. “To this day I don’t know what or who really triggered all of that violence,” he said.
Thousands of Salvadorans returned across the border, according to Binns, including some who had lived in Honduras for as long as 20 years. Many were in poor physical condition after beatings or walks of 50 or 100 miles. On June 26, El Salvador severed diplomatic relations with Honduras. Its statement accused the Honduran government of failing to punish crimes it called “genocide” or to assure compensation for damage done to Salvadorans.
The invasion followed in July. Salvadoran forces advanced into Honduras, but shortages of fuel and ammunition curtailed their progress. Binns recalled the army driving 20 to 30 kilometres into the country before running out of gas. The Organization of American States intervened, and a ceasefire was established on July 18; Salvadoran troops withdrew in early August. The brief fighting killed civilians as well as soldiers and disrupted trade between the countries.
The name “Soccer War” could make the conflict sound easier to explain—and easier to dismiss—than the diplomats’ accounts allowed. Robert S. Steven, who worked for the Third Party Nationals program, recalled struggling to get people in Washington to take it seriously. The reaction, he said, was that these were “banana republics having a war over a soccer game or something.”