For Central Americans, sport is serious business, and there’s nothing they get
around more than a good football match. But sometimes this passion can have
deadly consequences. There’s no better example of this than the 1969 Football War—where Honduras and
El Salvador went to war over the 1970 FIFA World Cup qualifier. Today, we’re telling that story.
Though the conflict in question is known around the world as the “Football War,”
more was at play between El Salvador and Honduras than their national teams.
The roots of the conflict were, as always, deeply historical.
El Salvador is roughly five times smaller than Honduras, yet in 1960, it had a 40% larger
population than Honduras and a faster-growing population. Virtually all of the 21,000
square kilometre country was under cultivation or supporting industries and settlement.
Not so for Honduras. Just over the border were vast tracts of land left
uncultivated or underutilised. Nowadays, we might consider such land to be useful,
like carbon-credit forests, but back in the 1960s, it was considered a colossal waste.
Their proximity meant Salvadorans had a long history of emigration to Honduras. It was
common for agricultural families to skip over the border and take up residence on the Honduran side.
Sometimes these immigrants got jobs working for large agricultural companies, sometimes they set
up small businesses, and sometimes they squatted on the land—taking up residence illegally. In many
outlying areas, this labour influx was seen as positive, and squatters were accepted as a part
of the community. In others, however, they competed with the locals in the labour market,
causing no small amount of friction. Despite this, Salvadorans became an economic fixture on
Honduras’s periphery, and by the mid-1960s, around 130,000 Salvadorans resided there.
It wasn’t to last. Honduras was the original banana republic: a state built by American
businessmen to serve their interests alone. Most Honduran land and infrastructure was owned by
foreign companies, and corruption was rife. Chiquita, formerly the United Fruit Company,
owned 10% of the state, which apparently wasn’t enough, and saw the Salvadorans as an
obstacle in the way of. Everyday Hondurans weren’t keen on foreign businesses owning their country,
and in the late 1960s, strikes and riots took place. The president, Oswaldo López,
tried to unite his people by blaming the Salvadorans for Honduras’s problems, glossing
over decades of corruption and exploitation by plutocratic governments and US companies.
He introduced the Land Reform Law in 1962, which threw all Salvadorans, legal owners or not,
off their land. This had the added effect of encouraging violence against the Salvadorans.
Now was clearly the perfect time for a football match.
Both El Salvador and Honduras won enough games during the group stage to advance into the 1970
FIFA World Cup qualifier semi-finals. They played three matches against each other,
the first on June 8th 1969 in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa.
In the lead-up to the match, Honduran politicians and the media
made increasingly inflammatory statements about Salvadorans. Reports of beatings,
lynchings, and peasants torching Salvadoran properties circulated in the newspapers.
The night before the match, Hondurans blockaded the hotel hosting the Salvadoran team.
The mob got drunk and made a deafening racket all night, preventing the Salvadorans from getting a
good night’s rest. The next day, the Hondurans scored a goal in the match’s 89th minute,
winning them the game. The Salvadorans felt they had been cheated,
and media outlets began reporting horror stories from Salvadoran emigrants just over the border.
The next match was held on June 15th, in El Salvador’s capital,
San Salvador. The Hondurans received the same welcome they gave the Salvadorans and didn’t get
a wink of sleep all night. They lost this second match, with the Salvadorans scoring three goals.
Violence erupted between fans in the city, resulting in the deaths of two Honduran fans.
The football pitch had become a battleground, and the players were its soldiers.
The games became a microcosm of the disagreement over land rights and immigration.
Both governments encouraged the violence.
Each side had won one game and lost one game, so a tie-breaker was in order. They played in
Mexico City, on neutral ground, but the day of the game, El Salvador broke off diplomatic ties
with Honduras. They claimed Honduras had “done nothing to prevent murder, oppression, rape,
plundering and the mass expulsion of Salvadorans” and that “these crimes constitute genocide.”
El Salvador won the game 3-2 in extra time, and then things really kicked off.
Once diplomatic ties were broken, both sides rushed to purchase arms in preparation for war.
Neither had the money for modern fighter jets like the nimble MiG-21 or the heavily armed
F-4 Phantom, so they bought old warbirds from the bargain bucket. Through a network of private
sellers, El Salvador managed to get hold of seven WWII-era P-51 mustangs and a few Corsairs.
The planes had been part of a civilian airshow but were retrofitted to carry weapons again. Alongside
these fighters, the Salvadorans also converted a few C-47 Dakota transport planes into bombers.
The Hondurans, on the other hand, already had an air force consisting of 12 Corsairs, as well as a
number of other training and reconnaissance planes. But they were caught off-guard.
On July 14th 1969, two weeks after qualifying for the world cup, El Salvador invaded Honduras.
On the ground, troops of the Salvadoran Army advanced toward the capital alongside
WWII-era M3 Stuart tanks. In the air, the first battles of the war were already raging.
El Salvador’s first strike was a bombing run on Toncontín International Airport,
the Honduran Air Force’s primary base. The Dakotas came in low, and their crews threw bombs out the
cargo hatch by hand. They managed to miss every single parked plane, but they put enough holes
in the runway to temporarily put it out of action. The mission was chalked up as a success, and the
army pressed further, safe in the knowledge that they controlled the skies. It wasn’t to last.
By the next day, Honduran workers had filled in the holes and the air force was up and running.
The Hondurans carried out their own raids on Salvadoran coastal oil facilities with
similarly converted Dakotas, but these airmen actually hit their targets. Plumes of smoke could
be seen from a great distance as fires raged inside the buildings. They burned for days.
Honduran fighter command also got busy. Captain Fernando Soto became a national hero
after shooting down three Salvadoran aircraft. He and his wingman got the jump on a Mustang
just South of Tegucigalpa, catching it flying low and strafing ground targets.
Soto came screaming in from altitude, tearing the Mustang to pieces with a burst of 20-millimetre
fire from his Corsair. Later, on the same patrol, Soto spotted two enemy Corsairs,
probably bought from the same dealer as his own. A relentless dogfight ensued
but Soto was the more skilled aviator. After a quick split-S manoeuvre, one Salvadoran plane
exploded and the other careened into the ground, wreathed in flame. In downing those three planes,
Captain Soto decreased El Salvador’s total fighter strength by at least 25%.
Despite the achievements of their ace pilots, the Hondurans were worried about the gains made by the
Salvadorans. They petitioned the Organization of American States, called OAS, to intervene
and stop the war. The OAS asked El Salvador to withdraw on July 18th, but the invaders resisted.
Few knew it, but the Salvadorans were in a dire situation. Attacks on their oil facilities
had crippled military supply lines, and the soldiers at the front were at risk of losing
their armoured support. The M3 Stuart might have been vintage, but they were effective,
and the Salvadorans did not want to launch an assault without them.
When the OAS asked them to withdraw again, this time threatening sanctions, they agreed. The
shooting stopped late on July 18th 1969, roughly 100 hours after it had started. Salvadoran
troops remained in Honduras until August 2nd, officially to protect civilians in occupied areas.
Though it was short, the Football War had long-lasting ramifications.
It took more than a decade for Honduras and El Salvador to reach a peace settlement,
and relations are still a little awkward today.
Losses on both sides totalled about 3,000—both military and civilian. Additionally,
300,000 Salvadorans were displaced and forced back into overpopulated El Salvador.
The government was reluctant to provide for these political refugees,
and their discontent was a major component behind the subsequent Salvadoran Civil War.
The Football War was the last conflict where piston-driven aircraft fought against each other,
and one of the few in history where both sides were kitted out with the same US-made
World War Two-era hardware. For the Salvadorans,
the only weapons they had that weren’t vintage were their rifles, which had
come from American supplies bound for Vietnam. It’s still unclear how they got to El Salvador.
But what do you think? Who was to blame for the initial situation: the governments,
or the companies? Was the conflict simply inevitable, or could it have been avoided?
Most important of all, would ANY of this have happened without that fateful football match?