It’s hard to imagine that America beating Portugal at anything would be newsworthy, but the American team’s 3-2 victory over Portugal in their World Cup match today is amazing; it’s the most significant U.S. soccer win since 1950. Then again, the World Cup is always amazing—the passions it arouses, the harmony it provokes, and the wars it ignites. Last year I wrote about a colorful soccer riot in Belgrade, when the best Serbian teams faced off, but it was minor compared to what can happen during the World Cup. The best way to understand the tournament’s emotional import is to cast aside the sports pages and read Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Soccer War. It chronicles, in Kapuscinski’s minimalist style, the conflict that was ignited after El Salvador and Honduras split their World Cup qualifying matches in 1969. Here’s a bit of it:
The Salvadoran team arrived in Tegucigalpa on Saturday and spent a sleepless night in their hotel. The team could not sleep because it was the target of psychological warfare waged by the Honduran fans. A swarm of people encircled the hotel. The crowd threw stones at the windows and beat sheets of tin and empty barrels with sticks. They set off one string of firecrackers after another. They leaned on the horns of cars parked in front of the hotel. The fans whistled, screamed and sent up hostile chants. This went on all night. The idea was that a sleepy, edgy, exhausted team would be bound to lose. In Latin America these are common practices.
The next day Honduras defeated the sleepless El Salvador squad one-nil.
Eighteen-year old Amelia Bolanios was sitting in front of the television in El Salvador when the Honduran striker Roberto Cardona scored the winning goal in the final minute. She got up and ran to the desk which contained her father’s pistol in a drawer. She then shot herself in the heart. ‘The young girl could not bear to see her fatherland brought to its knees,’ wrote the Salvadoran newspaper El Nacional the next day. The whole capital took part in the televised funeral of Amelia Bolanios. An army honour guard marched with a flag at the head of the procession. The president of the republic and his ministers walked behind the flag-draped coffin. Behind the government came the Salvadoran soccer eleven who, booed, laughed at and spat on at the Tegucigalpa airport, had returned to El Salvador on a special flight that morning.
But the return match of the series took place in San Salvador, in the beautifully named Flor Blanca stadium, a week later. This time it was the Honduran team that spent a sleepless night. The screaming crowd of fans broke all the windows in the hotel and threw rotten eggs, dead rats and stinking rags inside. The players were taken to the match in armoured cars of the First Salvadoran Mechanized Division—which saved them from revenge and bloodshed at the hands of the mob that lined the route, holding up portraits of the national heroine Amelia Bolanios.
The army surrounded the ground. On the pitch stood a cordon of soldiers from a crack regiment of the Guardia Nacional, armed with submachine guns. During the playing of the Honduran national anthem the crowd roared and whistled. Next, instead of the Honduran flag—which had been burnt before the eyes of the spectators, driving them mad with joy—the hosts ran a dirty, tattered dishrag up the flagpole. Under such conditions the players from Tegucigalpa did not, understandably, have their minds on the game. They had their minds on getting out alive. ‘We’re awfully lucky that we lost,’ said the visiting coach, Mario Griffin, with relief.
El Salvador prevailed, three-nil.
The same armoured cars carried the Honduran team straight from the playing field to the airport. A worse fate awaited the visiting fans. Kicked and beaten, they fled towards the border. Two of them died. Scores landed in hospital. One hundred and fifty of the visitors’ cars were burned. The border between the two states was closed a few hours later.
The war began shortly thereafter. It lasted 100 hours and left 6,000 dead and more than 12,000 wounded. The deciding game was held on neutral ground, in Mexico. El Salvador won 3-2.
