00:00As stones cracked off the hotel windows and firecrackers went off in the street below,
00:04the players of El Salvador's national football team gave up on any hope of sleep.
00:09It was the night before the most important match of their lives,
00:13and the entire Honduran capital, it seemed, had turned out to make sure they didn't rest for a second of
00:18it.
00:18El Salvador and Honduras are neighbours, and the match was a World Cup qualifier.
00:23Only one of the two countries could earn a place at the tournament,
00:26but the vitriol was about much more than football.
00:29See, El Salvador was a tiny and desperately overcrowded country,
00:32so for decades its landless farmers had been crossing into the bigger, emptier Honduras to find work and somewhere to
00:39live.
00:39By 1969, an estimated 300,000 Salvadorans had settled there,
00:44but in early 1969 Honduras had begun taking that land back.
00:49Both countries were run by quite unpopular military governments,
00:52and both had worked out that a crowd screaming at a foreign enemy was a crowd that wasn't screaming at
00:57them.
00:58So they both vilified the other country's people and fostered a deep divide between the two nations,
01:04which had now begun overflowing into football too.
01:07When the sleepless, exhausted El Salvador side finally took to the field the next day, they lost 1-0.
01:13A week later, the second match was played in San Salvador,
01:16and this time it was the Honduran players who didn't sleep.
01:18Their hotel windows were smashed and rotten eggs and dead rats were thrown through the holes.
01:23They were driven into the stadium in armored cars the next day,
01:26and instead of raising the Honduran flag, the hosts burned it and ran a dirty dishrag up the pole instead.
01:33El Salvador won that game 3-0.
01:35And so, a third deciding match was held on neutral ground in Mexico City.
01:39El Salvador won it 3-2 in extra time,
01:42and around that final whistle, El Salvador cut every diplomatic tie they had with Honduras.
01:48Because for the Salvadoran leadership, destroying Honduras on the football field wasn't enough.
01:53And they knew that while the tensions were high between their people,
01:56now was as good a time as any to take advantage of the momentum.
01:59And so, a couple weeks later, El Salvador's air force struck.
02:03However, they didn't really have any legitimate bombers,
02:05so the Salvadoran air force improvised.
02:08Soldiers literally pushed pipe bombs by hand out of the open cargo doors of converted C-47 passenger planes,
02:15while others attached makeshift bomb racks to World War II-era fighters.
02:19And as these crude airstrikes targeted Honduran airfields, the Salvadoran army poured over the border.
02:25But despite initially being caught off guard by the attack,
02:28Honduran pilots pretty quickly destroyed El Salvador's cobbled-together air force and their oil storage facilities,
02:35leaving the Salvadoran tanks and supply trucks running on fumes and stalling the invasion almost immediately.
02:41The fighting lasted barely 100 hours before the organization of American states forced a ceasefire.
02:47But it was still enough time to cause some serious damage.
02:503,000 people were killed.
02:51Both economies were left in ruins.
02:53And El Salvador had won the battle on the football pitch, but lost the war.
