Soccer, rape and jail

fuente

In 1969 the world witnessed something that seemed torn from the past. It was a war - a guerrilla war - between Honduras and El Salvador.

They participated junk planes of the Second World War that had never returned to fly. That was called the Football War.

I met one of your fighters. But nobody imagines why that Salvadoran named Mateo Santacruz, who at that time was 27 years old, took up arms. Once he told me the story himself.

Those 2 Central American countries lived under the sway of military castes, with millions of impoverished peasants who worked from sunrise to sun for the big landowners.

But El Salvador had more problems: its territory was only a fifth of the Honduran, but with many more inhabitants.

To search for bread, 300,000 Salvadoran peasants had slowly invaded Honduran territory, over the years, as laborers, and some had become medium and small entrepreneurs.

Then La Mancha Brava appeared, which was not a Honduran soccer bar, but a paramilitary group charged with harassing and expelling the Salvadorans.

One of the victims was Mateo Santacruz. And one of the paramilitaries whom he knew as Nepomuceno, and with whom he had played soccer as a young man, took the opportunity to rape his sister.

Suddenly, years of work, a small house and a piece of land were lost forever. But some say that the god of revenge exists, and at that moment war broke out between the two countries, and the trigger was some football match qualifier to the 70 World Cup.

Santacruz enrolled as a volunteer and in less than twelve hours was in the village of Nepomuceno, looking for him to kill him.

With other Salvadoran soldiers and volunteers, they devastated, they shot everything that moved, regardless of whether they were innocent civilians.

What counted was revenge. After four days the war ended with 5,000 dead. Mateo returned to his country, was decorated, and dreamed that among the Honduran dead he had been Nepomuceno.

Years later, in the Gulf of Fonseca, on the border, Mateo saw Nepomuceno face to face and with a single blow of machete he blew his head.

Apprehended, and accused of aggravated crime because he did it in cold blood, without provocation, with the victim unarmed, Mateo was sentenced to 20 years in prison and left so old that it looked like 60 had passed.

"I was decorated for killing dozens of innocent civilians, and they condemned me for killing a culprit, "Mateo Santacruz told me. So he summed up his life.

In chess, as in the history of Santacruz, you also have to know how to kill on time.

This story was originally written by my friend Ramiro Díez in Diario EL TELÉGRAFO under the following address: https://www.eltelegrafo.com.ec/noticias/columnistas/1/futbol-violacion-y-carcel If you are going to use it, please quote our source and place a link to the original note. www.eltelegrafo.com.ec