A war broke out because of football! What is the "football war" about?

A war broke out because of football! What is the "football war" about? Interested friends, come and take a look!

We often hear people say , Football is a war in peacetime, but in modern history, a war really broke out because of football. On July 14, 1967, the only football war in mankind so far broke out. This war took place between two small countries in the Americas, El Salvador and Honduras. The two countries went to war over football. The number of troops deployed by both sides reached 54,000. The air force and army opened fire. The entire war lasted for 6 days, resulting in more than 3,000 casualties. So what is going on? Now let’s find out together.

Central America refers to the narrow strip of land south of Mexico and north of the Panama Canal. The east and west are surrounded by the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean respectively.

The total area of ??Central America is less than 500,000 square kilometers, roughly the same area as Sichuan Province in China. But there are seven countries gathered in this narrow strip. It can be seen that Central American countries are all small countries.

El Salvador and Honduras are neighbors. These two countries have one thing in common, that is, although their economies are underdeveloped, they both love football very much. From the president to the common people, almost everyone is a fan. Moreover, their football level is not low. The El Salvador national football team has advanced to the World Cup finals twice in 1970 and 1982, and the Honduras national football team has also advanced to the World Cup finals three times in 1982, 2010 and 2014.

We know that there are 32 places in the World Cup finals. Among them, Central and North America and the Caribbean have 3.5 places. El Salvador and Honduras often fight for a ticket to the World Cup finals, like a feud.

In the early summer of 1969, they met in the knockout stage in order to qualify for the 1970 Mexico World Cup finals.

On June 6, the first match of the knockout round was played at home in Honduras.

On the night before the game, the hotel where the El Salvador football team lives was bustling with gongs and drums. What's going on? It turns out that many Honduran fans were beating gongs and drums, shouting and making noise outside the hotel. There is only one purpose, which is to prevent the Salvadoran football players from getting a good rest.

The Salvadoran football team couldn’t bear the harassment and called the police. They didn't get help, they got ridicule.

The result can be imagined. On the second day of the game, the originally dominant El Salvador football team lost 0:1 due to lack of sleep, lack of physical strength, and poor performance.

As the news spread back home, Salvadoran fans fell into frustration. An 18-year-old female fan even committed suicide with a gun due to excessive grief. Her death shocked the country; her funeral became a state funeral, and even the president came to attend the funeral. The Salvadoran media wrote in a sensational tone: "Young girls cannot bear to see their motherland kneeling in front of others."

Is this the end? No.

"The situation will change, and it will come to my home next year." On June 15, it was the turn of the Honduras football team to play away in El Salvador.

This time, Salvadoran fans didn’t even bother to make noise outside the hotel where the Honduran football team stayed. They smashed the hotel room glass and threw rotten eggs, rotten tomatoes, gravel, dead rats, etc. in, horrifying the Honduran football players.

The Honduran football team was forced to ask the police for help. But they desperately found that the police were standing among the fans and throwing stones at them...

Even after the game started, the humiliation against the Honduran football team was not over. The Honduran football players were surprised to find that the Honduran flag was replaced by a rag on the field, and they were booed after the national anthem was played.

What else can the Honduran football team say? They had no intention of playing, and they didn’t even dare to shoot at the goal. They lost 0:3 and quickly ran away amidst the insults of tens of thousands of Salvadoran fans.

The two sides tied one to one. According to the rules, Honduras and El Salvador need to play an extra game to decide the outcome. In view of the tense atmosphere between the two countries, in order to avoid a crisis, this play-off was held in the third country, Mexico.

Just before the play-offs, Honduras and El Salvador announced at the same time that they were entering a state of war readiness.

On June 27, with a whistle, the football decisive battle between Honduras and El Salvador began. In order to protect the honor of their country, the two teams used all their abilities to compete. In 90 minutes, they tied 2:2. The game entered overtime. At this time, under the favor of the goddess of fate, the superior El Salvador football team scored the winning goal, ruthlessly eliminated the Honduras football team, and got a ticket to the 1970 Mexico World Cup finals.

The entire country of El Salvador reveled. They did not expect that a tragedy would quietly strike...

Let's first talk about the relationship between Honduras and El Salvador.

As mentioned earlier, Honduras and El Salvador are neighbors. In terms of land area, Honduras has 110,000 square kilometers, while El Salvador has only over 20,000 square kilometers. In terms of population, in 1969 there were only more than 2 million people in Honduras and more than 3 million people in El Salvador. Due to the scarcity of land and the abundance of people, many Salvadorans have entered Honduras to make a living by farming.

Over the generations, many Salvadoran expatriates have integrated into Honduras and become de facto Hondurans.

In early 1969, the Arellano regime in Honduras announced that it would expel the Salvadoran expatriates farming in Honduras back to the country and redistribute the land they farmed to the Hondurans. This policy makes the Salvadoran government very angry, because they have no extra land to provide to expatriates.

The relationship between the two countries has dropped to a freezing point. It happened at this time that the tragedy and comedy of a football war occurred! When the news of the Honduran football team’s failure in Mexico came back, thousands of Honduran fans took to the streets with iron rods, bricks, and even weapons in their hands, beating and beating them almost crazily. Robbery, rape, and murder of Salvadoran expatriates. Many Salvadoran expats knelt down and begged for mercy, but were not spared. In this violent action, approximately hundreds of Salvadoran expats died, and tens of thousands of Salvadoran expats fled Honduras.

The Honduran government did not stop this atrocity. Instead, it ordered the official implementation of the policy of deporting Salvadoran immigrants, which made the violence against Salvadoran immigrants intensified.

War is about to break out. Neither party had any intention of controlling the development of the situation.

On the evening of July 14, with El Salvador taking the lead in attacking Honduras with a "blitzkrieg", a war over football officially broke out.

Although both sides invested tens of thousands of people, the army and air force were all mobilized to start the fight in earnest. However, in the eyes of outsiders, this is still a very "funny" war.

- Both countries have weak militaries, Honduras even weaker. Honduras has deployed three battalions of troops on the border, which are mainly responsible for patrolling and anti-smuggling. After the war broke out, facing the surging Salvadoran army, they only fired a few shots at random, then took off their uniforms and fled;

——The Salvadoran army also "mutated each other". On July 16, El Salvador dispatched its air force to attack Honduras. Unexpectedly, before the two planes left the airport, they were forced to suspend their plans due to a serious collision, which also caused the airport to shut down;

——The weapons of both countries are very backward, and the most advanced one is probably the most advanced one. It's a plane. What's interesting is that all their equipment is old antique aircraft that were eliminated during World War II. Since there is no advanced radar and the radio command system is not working well at all times, it is up to the pilots to get the aircraft into the sky. As a result, it often happens that pilots cannot find the enemy.

Once, a Honduran pilot even ran to neighboring Guatemala in a daze;

——The Salvadoran Air Force came out in full force, including more than 10 agricultural aircraft spraying pesticides. El Salvador lacked bombers and once converted a transport aircraft into a bomber. The transport planes did not have bomb-dropping devices, so how did they carry out the bombing mission? This was not difficult for the heroic Salvadoran pilots. While flying the plane, they dropped bombs out of the window;

——Suffering from the lack of advanced weapons, El Salvador decided to purchase a batch of aircraft from other countries. Five days later, these aircraft were finally delivered, but by this time the war was over...

Yes, with the intervention of the United States and American countries, this football war did not last long. The fighting started on July 14, and basically stopped on July 18, and an armistice agreement was signed on July 20. There were only 6 days left to complete the attack, so people called it the "American version of the Six-Day War", which was different from the Six-Day War in the Middle East. During these six days, the two sides actually fought for only 100 hours, so it is also called the "100-hour war."

There are no winners in this war, they all lose.

In the short term, El Salvador paid the price with more than 900 casualties, while Honduras suffered more than 2,100 casualties.

In the long run, El Salvador was trapped in the contradiction between more people and less land, and the political situation was unstable. Finally, a 10-year civil war broke out in 1979. Honduras expelled the Salvadoran immigrants and the economic situation has not improved. Today, Honduras remains one of the poorest countries in the world.

By the way, Honduras’ population caught up from behind and reached 9.11 million in 2016, far exceeding El Salvador’s 6.34 million.

You may not believe it, but in this war between El Salvador and Honduras, the biggest loser is not El Salvador, nor Honduras, but the United States, which cannot even win this war.

It turns out that after the Cuban Revolution, Cuba became a serious concern for the United States. In order to offset the impact of the Cuban Revolution, the United States planned to cultivate power in Central America and integrate Central American countries. To this end, it proposed the "Integrated Market" plan. However, due to the outbreak of the football war and the long-term hostility between El Salvador and Honduras, the "single market" plan was shelved for 12 years, which directly affected the United States' strategic layout in Central America.

I think after hearing the news about the outbreak of the football war, Americans felt like crying.