Football War - Context

Context

Although the nickname "Football War" implies that the conflict was due to a soccer match, the causes of the war go much deeper. The roots of the war were issues over land reform in Honduras and immigration and demographic problems in El Salvador. Honduras is more than five times the size of neighbouring El Salvador, but in 1969 El Salvador had a population that was more than double that of Honduras. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Salvadorans had begun migrating to Honduras in large numbers. By 1969, more than 300,000 Salvadorans were living in Honduras. These Salvadorans made up twenty percent of the peasant population of Honduras. In Honduras, as in much of Central America, a large majority of the land was owned by large landowners or big corporations. The United Fruit Company owned ten percent of the land, making it hard for the average landowners to compete. In 1966, the United Fruit Company banded together with many other large companies to create la Federación Nacional de Agricultores y Ganaderos de Honduras (FENAGH; the National Federation of Farmers and Livestock-Farmers of Honduras). FENAGH was anti-campesino as well as anti-Salvadoran. This group put pressure on the Honduran president, General Oswaldo López Arellano, to protect the property rights of wealthy landowners.

In 1962, Honduras successfully enacted a new land reform law. Fully enforced by 1967, this law gave the central government and municipalities much land occupied illegally by Salvadoran immigrants and redistributed this land to native-born Honduran peoples as specified by the Land Reform Law. The land was taken from both immigrant farmers and squatters regardless of their claims to ownership or immigration status. This also created problems for Salvadorans and Hondurans who were intermarried with each other. Thousands of Salvadoran labourers were expelled from Honduras, including both temporary harvest workers and longer-term settlers. This general rise in tensions ultimately led to a military conflict.