Politics has littered football history with conflicts for generations, but few occasions can have had the impact that one of the CONCACAF qualifiers for the 1970 World Cup did in 1969, as El Salvador and Honduras met in the semi-finals in a bid to become the first Central American side to qualify for world football's showpiece event.
Despite the name attributed to it, the background of the quarrels between the two is not purely rooted in football; a complex economic and environmental dispute along their border had been waging for over 30 years, with land disputes at its core.
Overpopulated El Salvador had what historian David Goldblatt called ''the most grotesquely unequal distribution of land in a grotesquely unequal part of the world.'' This meant that there were large numbers of landless and destitute peasants who went in search of work in the larger and much less densely populated neighbour Honduras - by 1969, that number had reached over 300,000.
These Salvadoran immigrants made up 20% of the peasant population in Honduras but, in the country, President General Lopez Arellano was being forced to protect the property rights of wealthy landowners, who owned the majority of the land. A Land Reform Law that fully came into force in 1967 ensured that any land occupied illegally by Salvadorans was redistributed to native-born Hondurans.
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