1969 records several sporting events that marked an era and are important to remember. In football, Pelé made headlines by scoring his 1,000th goal in the Santos-Vasco Da Gama match at the Maracana in Rio de Janeiro. However, in 1969, the qualifiers for the 1970 World Cup were also played, and Central America was in the center of attention of the entire planet. Concacaf had the possibility of one more country participating, as the host was Mexico. Haiti advanced to the qualifiers to play the winner of the series between Honduras and El Salvador, a dispute that involved several incidents.

An additional game was required, played on June 27, 1969 at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico. El Salvador won and attended their first World Cup, as they then defeated Haiti. However, it was the matches between Honduras and El Salvador that caused very serious events. In his report, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski called the five days of conflict “a football war”.

After several years, Kapuscinski was asked if he could imagine the scope of what such a qualification would represent. He replied that he did it to contextualize what was happening at those matches and that there was no other purpose than to illustrate such a violent football match. What happened in those three games that qualified El Salvador for the crucial stage against Haiti? The first match was played in Tegucigalpa with a packed stadium and almost 5,000 Salvadorans visiting, who were permanently offended.

The delegation of El Salvador submitted a request to FIFA for the incidents caused the night before the match in front of the hotel where their players were staying. They harassed them, threw stones and torches, and broke the windows of their rooms. Salvadoran media representatives focused on telling their country’s fans that the aggression was unrelenting and that the public force protected and sponsored the attacks. Even before the match, more than a dozen Salvadoran fans had to receive medical attention in hospitals in Tegucigalpa.

The match was strong, and the frictions were euphorically celebrated by the local public. Honduras won 1-0 with a goal scored in a controversial action in which the Honduran striker brazenly attacked the opponent’s goalkeeper, in full view of the referee’s patience. Radio stations in El Salvador described what happened as a horror novel. The story was so shocking that it was learned that 18-year-old Salvadoran Amelia Bolaños could not bear such damage and made the fatal decision to take her own life. He died on the spot when he shot himself in the chest with his father’s gun. The Salvadoran government declared mourning and the funeral was broadcast on national TV. Amelia’s coffin was covered with the country’s flag and attended by President Fidel Sánchez Hernández and his ministers.

One of the ministers said young Amelia committed suicide because she “could not bear to see her country on its knees,” a claim that ignited patriotism and a thirst for revenge for the second leg, which would be in San Salvador. The tension fueled by the state-run press was such that a hateful campaign was born. The FIFA delegates present fell silent. Honduras was unable to train and returned to the Intercontinental Hotel, surrounded by fans trying to get in. They overpowered the police guard several times and explosions of hand-made bombs were heard.

Honduran football players assure that they witnessed how a young man was stoned and bled to death, without anyone’s help. The team from Honduras decided to leave the hotel through the back door and in groups of three, in order to seduce the protesters. The football players stayed in the private residences of their country’s diplomats. In the end, there was a match and Salvador won 3-0. The Hondurans left the stadium directly for the airport to return to their country. When they arrived they said: “God is great. Fortunately, we lost convincingly; It was the best thing that could have happened to us.”

The tension grew every day. The tiebreaker game in Mexico was scheduled as a neutral site. It was exciting. It ended 2-2, leading to overtime. There were only a few minutes left when Mauricio Pipo Rodríguez scored and Salvador won 3-2. The Honduran ambassador, Colonel Armando Velásquez, entered the Honduran dressing room, with the inconsolable and exhausted soccer players, and told them: “Gentlemen, players, lift your spirits. I must inform you that relations with El Salvador have been officially terminated and war is not ruled out”. Airman Rigoberto Gómez told the ambassador, “But it’s not a big deal; this is just a football game.” The soldier replied: “It is much more, you will understand.” And he said goodbye.

Of course there was more. Football will be used to justify war. Salvadoran radio warned that almost 300,000 compatriots living in Honduras were brutally attacked by the La Mancha Brava group, under the slogan “Take a log and kill a Salvadoran.” There was a reason for the presence of these peasants from El Salvador in the neighboring country: fourteen landowning families encouraged their voluntary exile to work on the land of Honduras.

The Honduran president, faced with this unsustainable migration, issued an agrarian reform law that stripped these Salvadorans of their property. Thus, on July 14, 1969, the Salvadoran army attacked the territory of Honduras with aircraft from the Second World War and arrived at the gates of Tegucigalpa. Salvador occupied 1000 square kilometers. Then came the answer from Honduras. During a hundred hours of battle, the conflict caused 7,000 dead and 20,000 wounded. The OAS intervened and a ceasefire was declared. It was only in 1986 that the International Court of Justice, based in The Hague, returned all rights and territories to Honduras. The Salvadoran peasants returned to their land dissatisfied. This was the germ that sparked the civil war in El Salvador.

These unfortunate events serve to show that passion and social responsibility are not separate in football. There is a risk when it is used as a trigger to intoxicate the masses or to demand inequality. In both cases, it is worse when the motives are sharpened; there the results are uncertain. The so-called “football war” proves this.

In 2013, the newspaper El Heraldo from Tegucigalpa published a report confirming that the Salvadoran army had been planning the 1969 war since 1961, for two purposes: they wanted to have access to the Atlantic and to acquire more land to give to peasants dissatisfied with their distribution in several hands . Football was used for Machiavellian purposes. The scorer who qualified El Salvador for the 1970 World Cup said: “The matches were already fixed. Football didn’t cause the war: it was just a pretext.” (OR)