14th of July - War
Today, in France they commemorate Bastille Day, a special day for French people, but here in Honduras we have today as the start of the war with El Salvador, also known as the football war, as many people still believe the war was a result of the World Cup qualifying games which took place a few days before the war started. This is just not so, behind this war there were a lot of socio political problems that were challenging both countries.
At that time El Salvador had a much larger population than Honduras, and obviously had problems because most of the land in that country was in the hands of the so called 14 families, making a living was difficult for Salvadorans and many of them came to Honduras to earn their living. This was part of the problem, here many people saw them as taking jobs which did not belong to them (I keep seeing this happen everywhere), so yes there were tensions. But I think the real problem was that both countries were under military rule in the disguise of democratic leaders, and both governments were disliked by its people, so I think it is obvious a war would win the governments the support of the people, remember Argentina's war with the UK over the Falkland Islands.
Anyway when this happened in 1969 I lived a few kilometers south of the capital Tegucigalpa and I witnessed one of the first actions of the war, late afternoon a Salvadoran TACA civilian plane was chased by a Honduran corsair fighter (WWII vintage, our whole fleet of nine was later sold to Hollywood, El Salvador had slightly more modern Mustangs) which was firing machine gun warning shots, Apparently El Salvador had already launched an invasion in the morning. Well the war went on for days, a few hundred feet from our home there was a bridge and the local people guarded it, most of them armed with machetes.
Eventually the OAS was able to coordinate a cease fire and the war ended but relations between the two countries were sour for decades. People from both countries who lived in the other were harassed and I know here in Honduras most Salvadoran properties were confiscated. I guess the local elites took control of them, getting richer that way. I imagine the same happened in El Salvador even though not as much as not many Hondurans lived there. A pointless war if there ever was one.
But just to give you an idea of how things are improvised in this country, about a month after the war my older brother and I (I was going to be 8 then) went for a walk to the city's airport about four kilometers away, through very barren land just a few bushes mostly arid, and would you believe it, we found a Honduran army machine gun on a tripod with nobody guarding it, I believe they had forgotten about it.
Well that is one of the many memories I have, but it is one that makes me sad, it was really a war over nothing, and a lot of people were killed. At least we found out our army was led by very corrupt people, we had a battalion in the west of the country were they were supposed to have close to 1,000 soldiers in reality there were about 50, you see the commander stole the money that was budgeted for food and the miserable salaries soldiers earned.