Death or Glory

Both sides continue to blame one another for starting the six day war between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969 that has become known as the `Fútbol War’ (or `Soccer War’). Honduras insist that their territorial integrity had been violated by El Salvador and Salvadoreans claim they launched a pre-emptive strike to ward off an imminent Honduran invasion. Debate still rages as to the role football actually played in the infamous conflict. The players lament that they were used as pawns by their respective governments, and although the title of Ryszard Kapúscínski’s masterful account of the conflict may suggest where his version of events lies, even The Soccer War suggests that money, power and plain old-fashioned xenophobia may well have been greater contributory factors than football. Yet just as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland were the sparks which triggered off the World Wars of 1914 and 1939 respectively, the World Cup qualifiers between Honduras and El Salvador, who’d been firing bullets and insults at one another for decades, lit the blue touch paper for the nasty and occasionally farcical conflict between the two nations.

In the late 1960s, the entire Central American region was bubbling with intrigue and political upheaval. Somehow football often seemed to be at the centre of it, either directly or indirectly. In Guatemala, Carlos Arana Guat assumed power in a ‘non transparent’ manner and immediately cracked down on law and order. My contact in the region, Jaime Marena, recalls a huge number of troops being sent to keep guard at football matches, because the authorities were convinced (rightly as it turned out) that left-wing opposition groups used matches as a meeting place to launch their insurgency movements. In Nicaragua, the Somoza dynasty regularly swooped on games in a bid to ‘cleanse’ the country of the Sandinistas. Further south, General Medici ordered his generals to monitor the movements of Pelé and the Brazil team. Uruguayan President Areco, who, after civil unrest, issued an emergency decree in late 1969, freely admitted to Medici that a decent showing by ‘La Celeste’ in the 1970 World Cup would buy him valuable time in power. Argentina’s President Organia, on the other hand, having seen his team fail to qualify for that tournament, realised his time was nearly up and it wasn’t long before the Peronists once again swept into government. In the host nation, Mexico, President Ordaz, whose troops had executed 250 dissidents on the eve of the 1968 Olympics, said, “The fact that we are hosting the 1970 World Cup now gives a chance for the other nations within the CONCACAF region to show their mettle. Given the size of our population – some 90 million – it is perhaps unsurprising that our neighbours and comrades are often in our shadow. Here is their chance – an opportunity to show their fighting spirit to the world.” Apparently Ordaz – who cleverly organised the elections for the first week of the World Cup, when he knew nationalistic fervour would be at its height – wasn’t deliberately attempting to be ironic or sarcastic.

At the time, the conflict between El Salvador and Honduras, which became known as ‘the Fútbol War’ was largely overlooked by the world’s press, distracted by the Apollo 11 mission and the Chappaquiddick scandal that embroiled Senator Ted Kennedy. In the midst of this, confusion reigned on the western side of Central America. As the war rumbled into action, El Salvador midfielder Juan Martinez told an American journalist, “Everyone’s blaming each other for what is happening, and I’ve got a bad feeling that we’ll all be damned to hell for all of this.”

Like the experiences of the Zaire players four years later, the intrigue which swirls around El Salvador’s 1970 World Cup adventure makes it a compelling story. “In 1969, the whole region was ready to explode,” admitted Alberto Villalta in 2006. “You could feel it in the air. We were told to go and spill blood for the honour of our country. The message was reinforced by our families and the media across both countries. You couldn’t avoid the incessant babble about fighting and warring anywhere. We were just footballers, who wanted to play sport. But there was no escape.” Ongoing border disputes, murders, a high-profile suicide, a bloodthirsty media and – the unlikeliest cause of all – a teachers’ strike gone horribly wrong . . . against this backdrop, both nations’ footballers, with the eyes of Central America resting firmly upon them, prepared to lock horns in arguably the most infamous series of World Cup matches ever played.

One of the difficulties of investigating the Fútbol War is the singular lack of primary sources remaining. Much of what has been documented down the years are stories which have been passed down and football writers, understandably, have tended to rely on Kapúscínski’s book for first-hand evidence. In order to gain access to a disparate and, in several cases, impoverished group of players, only the likes of Jaime Marena, who has travelled widely in the region and who has built up a network of contacts, have the key. I was put in contact with Marena by the University of Kent and warned by an intern that he was “mercurial.” In other words, he was downright unreliable. Disappearing under the radar for months on end, he would then resurface and recount conversations which provided fresh insight on one of the World Cup’s murkiest and most misunderstood stories. His mobile number changed with bewildering regularity but his irregular calls were unfailingly engrossing. All the interviews with the surviving players, residents of both countries and fans from that period were conducted by Jaime, wherever he is now.

Gathering information in Central America can be a time consuming, tricky and occasionally fractious business. Many of the Salvadorean and Honduran players from that era earned little from the game, and 40 years on they want their cut if they are to reveal anything of consequence. Marena told me that one of the Salvadorean players, having demanded $100 in advance to speak, then admitted his memory was so poor that he couldn’t actually recall events with any clarity. Only when Jaime refused to leave his house did the player grudgingly give the money back two hours later. Chequebook journalism is risky in these parts, but a necessary evil nonetheless, particularly as other forms of evidence have mysteriously disappeared.

Although newspapers on both sides of the border are said to have fanned the flames of war, the back copies have vanished. In San Salvador, Diario Co Latino and La Prensa Grafica allegedly bandied around words like ‘pigs’ and ‘scum’ to describe the Hondurans, whilst over the border La Preise is supposed to have done likewise. Other forms of slander and verbal abuse included the countries calling one another ‘Nazis,’ ‘dwarfs,’ ‘drunkards,’ ‘sadists’ and ‘thieves.’ Following the well trodden example of the British Civil Service, fire, flood and multiple moves across town apparently account for why so much paperwork has disappeared into the ether over the years. Plus the occasional civil war and military coup . . .

The problems between the neighbouring nations of Honduras and El Salvador in the late 1960s all boiled down to living space. Honduras, with a population of about three million and 43,000 square miles, had plenty of it; El Salvador shoehorned her four million citizens into a mere 8,000 square miles. Statistically, Salvadoreans were the most densely packed populace in the entire hemisphere and, to make matters worse, there were thousands of acres of unused Honduran land lying just over the narrow river valley from El Salvador.

It was little wonder that year on year, thousands of Salvadoreans waded across the water in search of a scrap of land. In the early 1960s, Alberto Villalta’s family took up the Honduran government’s offer of temporary residency. “About 60,000 Salvadoreans were over the border at that time, and most didn’t have any legal documents. The Honduran government gave them five years to obtain legal status, or get back across the river. According to official statistics, only about 1,000 bothered to go through the correct channels. My family didn’t have the education or the willingness to do it properly. They thought the Honduran government would always turn a blind eye to the illegal travellers. They later described the Fútbol War as a peasant war, and to a degree, the El Salvador football team was a peasant team. Several of my teammates had families living illegally across the border. This was about to change.”

In the two months before Honduras and El Salvador clashed on the pitch in July 1969, there was plenty going on off it. Salvadorean policemen grabbed hold of Honduran politician Martinez Argueta who was visiting relatives across the border, and decided to lock him up for 20 years for illegal entry into their country. In retaliation, four Honduran soldiers rounded up 60 unarmed Salvadorean troops on the border and locked them up. Only direct intervention by US President Johnson resolved the situation, but in the year that followed machete fights and gunfights became de rigeur along the border.

It was hardly surprising, then, that when the El Salvador squad arrived in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa prior to the first of their CONCACAF semi-final matches to decide who would progress to the final World Cup qualification play-off, the atmosphere was tense. In the group stages, the Salvadoreans had nudged out Dutch Guiana and the Dutch Antilles, and Honduras had cruised past Costa Rica and Jamaica.

Although an armed guard ensured El Salvador’s safe passage from the airport into the city – which was then still relatively provincial – the visiting players’ moods changed as the team coach headed towards their hotel. “The bus screeched to a halt and the driver suddenly began swearing. Two of the tyres had been punctured and immediately it happened, a crowd gathered around us. We were convinced we’d been targeted and we didn’t learn the real truth until some months later,” recalls Alberto Villalta. In fact an especially militant group of striking teachers, anxious to publicise their cause for improved pay, had scattered tick tacks and roofing nails along the city’s main thoroughfares. Amidst the epidemic of flat tyres and punctures in the city, the Salvador fútbolistas were the most prominent victims of all. It took over two hours for the police to eventually disperse the crowds.

With the match scheduled for the following day, while the Salvador team attempted to sleep in their hotel a massive group of Hondurans gathered outside and created a cacophony of noise. This was common practice in the region when it came to big football matches, and the night before they played Brazil the England team would suffer the same fate at the Guadalajara Hilton, but the situation in Tegucigalpa soon spiralled out of control.

Alberto Villalta recalls, “It was a sweltering night and you had to keep the windows open. If you closed them, you’d melt. The abuse started from 11pm onwards. There must have been hundred gathered outside. “Hijos de putas!” (“Sons of bitches!”), “La puta que los pario” (“Sons of whores!”) they shouted. Then you had car horns going all night, and guys clattering dustbin lids. I don’t think any of us slept a wink and once the Salvadorean journalists who were staying in our hotel wired the news back home, we knew there would be a tit-for-tat situation for the return leg.”

In isolation, such events were not unusual in Central America but matters had already taken an extraordinary turn for the worse. Eighteen-year-old El Salvador supporter Amelia Bolanios, who was watching the match at home, “could not bear to see the fatherland brought to its knees,” wrote Salvadorean paper El Nacional on the day after the match and, having got up and run to her father’s desk, she reached for his pistol and shot herself through the heart. Two days later, Bolanios’s televised funeral was watched by 78 per cent of the Salvadorean population, in what was described by El Nacional as “a spontaneous outpouring of national grief.”

San Salvador resident Carlos Aquiem lived two streets away from Amelia Bolanios and recalls, “It is always a tragedy when a young person dies and especially when a life is lost over something as relatively trivial as football. On the one hand there was a genuine outpouring of grief from some of the populace, but the government’s exploitation of the whole thing was shameful. They ensured that an armed guard marched at the front of the procession and the President himself walked behind the coffin. The footballers, who’d just flown back from Honduras, also walked behind the cortége. It was very cynically done. Along the route, soldiers lined up and looked menacing. We were told they were there to stop people rushing forward with grief to throw flowers at the coffin. Many of us wondered if they were put there to stop people leaving the event. There were troops behind as well as in front of those watching. The onlookers were sandwiched between men with guns. There was an atmosphere of ‘You are going nowhere.’ In my opinion, the entire event besmirched the girl’s memory, but if their purpose was to unite the population and to stir things up for the return leg, it worked. I’d have hated to have been one of those footballers – the pressure was enormous.”

When the Honduran team arrived in San Salvador a few days later, they were caught up in a maelstrom of violence and racism. Striker Roberto ‘The Rabbit’ Cardona, so called because of his searing pace, immediately had placards of a large rabbit sodomising a smaller rabbit thrown in his face at the airport. “I could handle that kind of reception, but it upset others in the squad” he said. Of course there was also the obligatory chant of ‘Hijos de putas!’ resounding around the airport. Several of the baying Salvadorean mob had brought along toy golliwogs (unlike the El Salvador team, the Honduras squad contained several black players) with bones through their noses and proceeded to pour petrol on them and set them alight.

The entire situation was deemed so combustible that the army was summoned to take the visitors to their hotel. The vengeful Salvadorean mob surrounded the building and continued to wreak havoc. Trying unsuccessfully to grab some sleep was midfielder Manuel Molares. He recalls, “I guess we knew that something would happen. At about 11pm a huge roar went up outside and suddenly they pelted the whole hotel with rocks. It was only a three-storey building and they were able to smash every window in the whole place. We literally hid under our beds and before long dead rats and rags with shit smeared all over them came flying in. They threw petrol bombs in at ground-floor level. It was terrifying. Eventually, a contingent of policemen and our staff, came in and told us that we would be moved to another hotel. Armed policemen and soldiers held the crowds back but they followed us to our new accommodation, sang all night anyway and played drums. I think by then we were all so wound up that there was no way we could sleep anyway. When we went to the game the next day we went past our first hotel. It looked like something out of a war film, with shards of glass and blackened brickwork from the smoke.”

The Honduran players were escorted to San Salvador’s Flor Blanca Stadium in armoured cars, in order to protect them from the crowds lining the streets which held up pictures of the national martyr, Amelia Bolanios. A large contingent of the crowd had been present inside the ground since first light, in order to guarantee themselves a spot for a game, which even outdoes the Battle of Santiago in 1962 between hosts Chile and Italy for notoriety.

Carlos Aquiem arrived for the late afternoon kick-off shortly after 2.30pm and the scenes which awaited him, and the events which followed, still burn brightly in his mind: “There were soldiers everywhere, making sure that no one got through with weapons or anything else. You felt the whole thing was like a powder keg. Any Hondurans stupid enough to identify themselves were immediately set upon. I heard stories that three were ripped apart by the mob. It could be apocryphal, but such was the level of venom, nothing would surprise me.

“Once inside the ground there were regiments of the National Guard ringing the pitch with their rifles on full display. A lot of them were just kids. You could see them shaking and it concerned me to think about what might happen if things went wrong. Would they simply lose control? I actually started to feel sorry for the Hondurans when, after the playing of the national anthems, a dishrag covered in shit was raised up the flagpole, instead of the Honduran flag. Several of us discussed the fact that in order for this to have happened our own Football Association must surely have been in on the whole thing. It was mob rule.”

Frozen by fear and fatigue, the Hondurans were crushed 3–0 which meant that – as this was in the days before the aggregate score counted in two-legged World Cup matches – a single play-off match at a neutral venue would be required. Before all of that, though, after the Honduran team had snuck back across the border under armed guard (their coach Mario Griffin admitting, “We’re awfully lucky that we lost”), both capital cities descended into anarchy. Visiting Honduran fans who had gone to the game dispersed towards the border but in the mayhem that ensued, two were killed.

There was a tit-for-tat aspect to the ensuing mayhem in Tegucigalpa. The returning Honduran players quickly told journalists what had happened across the border and as soon as the information became public resident Salvadoreans were made to suffer. Honduran midfielder Manuel Molares recalls, “Some of my neighbours were Salvadoreans, and they had their front windows put through. Their shops were smashed up. It was nasty and unforgivable. How could one think it was anything else when innocent women and children were hiding under their beds thinking they are going to die? I felt very depressed about the whole thing and it made me question what kind of society we lived in. My neighbours got away with a warning but the whole thing spiralled out of control. Given the type of situation we were in, there were reports of murders, pillaging and huge numbers of injuries. I don’t think anyone has ever proved they happened but the stories continue to do the rounds about what our goon squads did to the Salvadoreans all those years ago.”

The play-off match took place in Mexico City and, given the publicity surrounding the first two matches, it was unsurprising that an estimated 25,000 from both countries made the pilgrimage. The 60,000-capacity stadium was crammed to the rafters. On one side of the ground stood the Salvadoreans, and on the other their deadly rivals. Between them stood an estimated 7,000 Mexican policemen armed with guns and thick clubs. But the huge police presence couldn’t stop violence breaking out in the stands as large groups of rival fans had infiltrated one another’s sections.

Later, Roberto Cardona would claim that, as Honduras’s most dangerous player, he was targeted for the entire game by El Salavador defenders and a neck-high tackle removed him from the equation late in the first half. Honduras later accused the referee and linesmen of crooked officiating and charged the entire Salvadorean team with cheating on the pitch, taking drugs, and attempting to steal their football boots. No matter how venomously the Hondurans protested, the facts were that in the dying minutes, Salvadorean striker Mauricio ‘Pipo’ Rodriguez blasted the winner to give his side a dramatic 3–2 victory. On the pitch at least, the war was over.

Less than six hours later, the first armed skirmishes took place on the border which separated the two countries, and an hour after that eight Salvadorean P-51 Mustangs, relics from World War II, bombed Toncontin Airport in Tegucigalpa. The first the outside world got to hear about it was when the Honduran President, via the only telex machine in the city, appealed for help from the USA via his ambassador in Washington.

That night a tropical storm blacked out Tegucigalpa. At dawn on the following day eight Honduran Corsairs bombed a fuel depot just outside San Salvador. Almost immediately the Salvadorean army launched a pre-emptive strike (the politicians would later claim they had intelligence that the Hondurans would invade later that day) and, using the same motorised vehicles which had taken the Honduran footballers to the border, got 75 miles outside Tegucigalpa before meeting armed resistance in the jungles and swamps.

Pipo’s intervention, like that of Gavrilo Princip’s in Sarajevo in 1914, would forever see him saddled with the label of the man who sparked the war. Having previously kept his counsel about the whole affair, he told Spanish TV in 2009, “I think this was the most important sporting event of that generation and the fact that I scored the decisive goal elevated the match’s importance throughout my life. People still think it was a goal which caused a war. This idea became more and more widespread and the importance of the goal appeared to grow as the stories became more and more embellished. But the goal clearly changed my life. It changed all of our lives.”

There remain two distinct versions of just who started the Fútbol War, depending on the nationality of your informant. At the time there seemed no limitations upon the inventiveness and aggression with which the facts were reported and atrocities of all conceivable types seemed to grow more grotesque by the hour. Border skirmishes were reported as heavy fighting, while both sides routinely claimed great military victories in a seemingly unending stream of deliberate misinformation.

In Tegucigalpa, Manuel Molares recalled, “We felt utterly crushed by the defeat we’d suffered on the pitch, but I couldn’t get my head around what so many people were saying. I met a soldier who asked me what it had been like to lose to a bunch of ‘motherfucking whores.’ How could we have failed to have beaten a side which the Honduran press reported had soiled themselves during the playing of the national anthems, contained at least six homosexuals and apparently turned up drunk to the match? He pulled out a .22-calibre pistol, fired shots into the air and told me he was going to find the Salvadorean players and shoot them in the balls.

“I asked him where he’d heard such complete and utter fabrication about the Salvadoreans. ‘It came through from my commander,’ he responded. ‘Well, you tell him that he’s told you a pack of bullshit,’ I responded. The man paused, aimed his pistol at me and shouted, ‘Are you sure you’re not a Salvadorean pig? You seem to like defending their honour.’ Then he sped off on his motorbike.”

In San Salvador, Alberto Villalta and his team-mates pondered what would happen next. “We were treated like national heroes when we returned,” he recalled, “but we hadn’t qualified yet, and still had to get past Haiti in order to reach the Finals. It was very distracting. In theory, we had ten days to prepare for the match, yet others were acting like all the work had been completed now we’d beaten Honduras. As footballers, we found that immensely frustrating. In addition we discussed the fact that FIFA would be unlikely to allow us to play Haiti if we were at war. It was unsettling but we resolved that if we eventually did reach the Finals, it would be a fantastic achievement considering the cards appeared to be stacked against us.”

In what proved to be another epic series of matches, Pipo scored a goal in the first game which El Salvador won 2–1 in Haiti, and broke his foot at the beginning of the second game, which his side lost 3–0 at home. With the nation sweating on his fitness, he spent several days with his foot in a cast, but after cortisone shots was deemed fit to play in the deciding play-off match. El Salvador triumphed 1–0 in the decisive game in Kingston, Jamaica and sealed their place in the Finals, but Pipo, forced to rest for three months after the match, was never quite the same player again. He suffered permanent damage to his foot and knee (“I placed huge strain on it when I played through the pain barrier”) which would force his premature retirement in 1972.

Next up came hosts Mexico, who’d recalled striker Enrique Borja, nephew of President Ordaz, after considerable pressure from the nation’s top man. The Salvadoreans had the longest national anthem of all the teams in the tournament and, thinking that it had finished, the Mexican team, anxious to crack on with the game, ran off into their half before the referee summoned them back to wait for the end. Duly incensed, the Salvadoreans started well, as Rodriguez and Calderon clattered the post. With the scores level at 0–0 after 45 minutes, referee Mahmoud Kandil from the United Arab Emirates awarded the visitors a free kick inside their own half. Inexplicably, Perez instead took it for Mexico, Valdiva slotted the loose ball past Salvador keeper Magaña, and the referee allowed the goal to stand. The visitors protested and the crowd was in uproar with fights erupting between fans in the Azteca. With El Salvador psycholo gically crushed, the hosts finally ran out 4–0 winners.

Twelve years later both El Salvador, now ripped apart by a civil war, and Honduras qualified for the World Cup in Spain. Although an official peace treaty between the two nations had only been signed two years previously and sporadic gunfire continued around the border, relations had improved significantly over the years, so much so that Honduras (who’d long since qualified) even opted to play properly against Mexico in a qualifier to grab a draw which ultimately enabled El Salvador, now under the tutelage of coach Pipo Rodriguez, to reach the Finals. That was where the Salvadoreans’ luck ended. Jet-lagged and exhausted after a 72-hour flight to Spain via Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Madrid and Alicante, they were forced to beg and borrow training kit and balls from group rivals Hungary. Two days later, the Hungarians chalked up a record 10–1 victory in front of 23,000 fans at the Estadio de Nuevo in Elche.

Luis Ramirez ‘El Pelé’ Zapata had the distinction of scoring his side’s only Finals goal to briefly claw the score back to 5–1, but even then there was an element of farce. Pipo recalls, “When Zapata scored the goal, he started cheering and celebrating and my players told him, ‘Don’t cheer so much because they’ll get annoyed and score even more against us.’ They did, racking up five more in 20 minutes. We were stigmatised by that defeat. Argentina only beat us 2–0 – Maradona had said he alone world score 10 against us – and we only lost by one goal to Belgium. We tightened up after the Hungary game and gave a good account of ourselves.”

In 1970, the Salvadoreans had lost all three games in Mexico, and 12 years later the same thing happened in Spain. With a World Cup record of Played 6, Won 0, Scored 1, Conceded 13, they are statistically the tournament’s worst performing side, along with the Dutch Antilles (who lost 6–0 to Hungary in 1938 in their solitary Finals match), Zaire in ’74 (Played 3, Won 0, Lost 3, Scored 0, Conceded 14) and Cuba, thumped 8–0 by Sweden in ’38 in their one Finals appearance.

Apart from Zapata, the only player to emerge with credit from the whole sorry affair was Jorge Alberto González (‘El Mágico’) who became a cult hero in the Spanish league with Cadiz and was selected for the World Cup XI, along with fellow strikers Zico and Paolo Rossi. When the other players returned home, several had their houses fire-bombed due to the disgrace of losing so heavily against Hungary and the entire squad had their free passes to league games revoked by their Football Association.

The civil war rumbled on for several more months (the team was allegedly split between those who supported the military government and others who backed the guerrillas) and Pipo, who admitted to being “psychologically exhausted” by the whole episode, opted to carve out a career in engineering, claiming that it was more lucrative than football. Honduras, on the other hand, earned plaudits by drawing with Northern Ireland and hosts Spain as they too were eliminated in the first round.

Although El Salvador have enjoyed upsetting Mexico on occasions during the last 28 years, they show no sign of reaching the Finals any time soon. Pipo looked back on his association with the national team with mixed feelings. “It’s a part of life. Not all is good, not all is bad. The truth is that I have had the honour of scoring the important goal which beat Honduras back in 1969,” he recalled. “I had the privilege of doing something great for El Salvador, but as a manager, I suffered the biggest defeat that El Salvador has ever had. These things are, shall we say, the logic of life, that you have to live with good and bad mixed together.”