FOOTBALL WAR HOURS

I know it’s funny to think about people going to war over a football game, but actually the war was over immigration, economic exploitation, and the actions of the wealthiest 1%. Too bad we in the US didn’t learn anything from it.

Although the nickname “Football War” implies that the conflict was due to a football match, the causes of the war went much deeper. The roots were issues over land reform in Honduras and immigration and demographic problems in El Salvador. Honduras has more than five times the area of neighboring El Salvador, but in 1969 the population of El Salvador (3.7 million) was 40% larger than that of Honduras (2.6 million). At the beginning of the 20th century, Salvadorans had begun migrating to Honduras in large numbers. By 1969, more than 300,000 Salvadorans were living in Honduras, making up more than 10% of Honduras’s population.[5]

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In Honduras, as in much of Central America, a large majority of the land was owned by big corporations or large landowners. The United Fruit Company owned 10% of the land, making it hard for the average landowner to compete. Just 8.8% of landowners held over 63% of the land, and the top 1% held over 38%.[8]: 53  In 1966, these landowners united to create the National Federation of Honduran Farmers and Ranchers (Spanish: Federación Nacional de Agricultores y Ganaderos de Honduras, FENAGH). This group put pressure on the President of Honduras, General Oswaldo López Arellano, to protect the property of wealthy landowners from campesinos, many of whom were Salvadoran.[8]: 64–75 

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In 1962, Honduras successfully enacted a new land reform law.[9] Fully enforced by 1967, this law gave the central government and municipalities much of the land occupied illegally by Salvadoran immigrants and redistributed it to native-born Hondurans. The land was taken from both immigrant farmers and squatters regardless of their claims to ownership or immigration status. This created problems for Salvadorans and Hondurans who were married. Thousands of Salvadoran laborers were expelled from Honduras, including both migrant workers and longer-term settlers. This general rise in tensions ultimately led to a military conflict.[10]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_War

AKA ‘Most reasonable Latin American reaction to a football game’

The war commenters describing each casualty live on the radio with a 2-minute celebration ‘KiiiiiiiiiiiilllllKILLKILLKILLKIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIILLLLkiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiillll! De Jose Pablo Perez Ortega!!! KIIIILLL!!’might have been a bit excessive though