The Soccer War (17 page)

He kept quiet. Then, after a while, he replied, ‘Son, I am the river and I can’t cross myself.’ He said nothing more, but kept turning the crank and listening to the record.

Describe the story of the Bolivian army sergeant, Mario Terana, who shot the wounded Che Guevara dead. Two days later, he began to feel afraid. He stopped answering orders or questions. The army discharged him. To disguise himself he went around in dark glasses. Then he began to be afraid of the dark glasses, because he thought they would serve as a mark of recognition for the avengers of Guevara. He locked himself in his house and did not go outside for a long time. But then he began to fear his house, since it was like a trap where the partisans hunting him could easily lay hold of him. He stopped drinking, afraid that every liquid contained poison. He wandered off in an unknown direction for two days. On the evening of the second day he shot himself in the neighbourhood of the small, poor village of Madre de Dios.

About what happened to my friend Pedro Morote, a Peruvian. As a young boy Pedro declared war on the upper classes and fought in a partisan unit led by his friend, the poet Javier Heraud. In May 1963, they walked into an ambush in Puerto Maldonado and Heraud, then twenty-one, tried to escape across a river when he was shot dead by the police. Pedro managed to get away and went into hiding. When the army later seized power, times changed, and Pedro re-emerged in the struggle against the upper
classes as an agricultural reform activist. We drove together to the most out-of-the-way Indian villages, where Pedro was distributing land to the poverty-stricken and benighted peasants. One day, on his return from one of these expeditions, Pedro learned that a friend of his had died and left him a considerable sum of money. In an instant everything changed. The partisan and reformer opened one of the most expensive and elegant nightspots in Lima, aimed at the upper-class market. Whoever turned up there—it was called
La Palisada
—could see a thick-set, stocky brown-haired man in a dinner jacket circulating among the tables, alert, contented (business was good) and accommodating. This was Pedro. He had put on a lot of weight, but he was brisk and strong. As he drifted through the room he was humming something under his breath. It is doubtful that any of the elegant clients knew that Pedro was singing the verses of his friend and leader Javier Heraud, who had died in an ambush so long ago.

Describe the market-place in the little town of Quetzaltepec (north of Oaxaca in Mexico). In the morning Indians of the Mixes tribe come in from the surrounding mountains. They arrive at the market carrying their wares on their backs, in bundles, in baskets. They spread everything out on the ground in the shade of the acacias planted around the large square. A kilogram of corn costs 1.25 pesos; beans 1.75 pesos; one hundred oranges two pesos; one hundred avocados three pesos. It is a silent market; nobody cries out his goods; transactions take place without words in an atmosphere characterized by the complete indifference of the buyer to the seller and the seller to the buyer. Around noon the heat sets in, the trading slows to a halt, then dies out
and everybody gathers in the dark Indian bars (
puestos de mescal
) around the market-place. A litre of
mescal
costs four pesos. The business ends in the complete drunkenness of everybody who took part in the market. Afterwards the drunks—men, women and children—return to their villages running into each other, falling down in the sand or on the stones and picking themselves up, returning home without a centavo, fuddled and destitute.

Describe the soccer war.

Luis Suarez said there was going to be a war, and I believed whatever Luis said. We were staying together in Mexico. Luis was giving me a lesson in Latin America: what it is and how to understand it. He could foresee many events. In his time he had predicted the fall of Goulart in Brazil, the fall of Bosch in the Dominican Republic and of Jimenez in Venezuela. Long before the return of Perón he believed that the old
caudillo
would again become president of Argentina; he foretold the sudden death of the Haitian dictator François Duvalier at a time when everybody said Papa Doc had many years left. Luis knew how to pick his way through Latin politics, in which amateurs like me got bogged down and blundered helplessly with each step.

This time Luis announced his belief that there would be a war after putting down the newspaper in which he had read a report on the soccer match between the Honduran and Salvadoran national teams. The two countries were playing for the right to take part in the 1970 World Cup in Mexico.

The first match was held on Sunday 8 June 1969, in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa.

Nobody in the world paid any attention.

The Salvadoran team arrived in Tegucigalpa on Saturday and spent a sleepless night in their hotel. The team could not sleep because it was the target of psychological warfare waged by the Honduran fans. A swarm of people encircled the hotel. The crowd threw stones at the windows and beat sheets of tin and empty barrels with sticks. They set off one string of firecrackers after another. They leaned on the horns of cars parked in front of the hotel. The fans whistled, screamed and sent up hostile chants. This went on all night. The idea was that a sleepy, edgy, exhausted team would be bound to lose. In Latin America these are common practices.

The next day Honduras defeated the sleepless El Salvador squad one-nil.

Eighteen-year-old Amelia Bolanios was sitting in front of the television in El Salvador when the Honduran striker Roberto Cardona scored the winning goal in the final minute. She got up and ran to the desk which contained her father’s pistol in a drawer. She then shot herself in the heart. ‘The young girl could not bear to see her fatherland brought to its knees,’ wrote the Salvadoran newspaper
El Nacional
the next day. The whole capital took part in the televised funeral of Amelia Bolanios. An army honour guard marched with a flag at the head of the procession. The president of the republic and his ministers walked behind the flag-draped coffin. Behind the government came the Salvadoran soccer eleven who, booed, laughed at, and spat on at the Tegucigalpa airport, had returned to El Salvador on a special flight that morning.

But the return match of the series took place in San Salvador, the beautifully named Flor Blanca stadium, a week later. This time it was the Honduran team that spent a sleepless night. The screaming crowd of fans broke all the windows in the hotel and threw rotten eggs, dead rats and stinking rags inside. The players were taken to the match in armoured cars of the First Salvadoran Mechanized Division—which saved them from revenge and bloodshed at the hands of the mob that lined the route, holding up portraits of the national heroine Amelia Bolanios.

The army surrounded the ground. On the pitch stood a cordon of soldiers from a crack regiment of the
Guardia Nacional
, armed with sub-machine-guns. During the playing of the Honduran national anthem the crowd roared and whistled. Next, instead of the Honduran flag—which had been burnt before the eyes of the spectators, driving them mad with joy—the hosts ran a dirty, tattered dishrag
up the flag-pole. Under such conditions the players from Tegucigalpa did not, understandably, have their minds on the game. They had their minds on getting out alive. ‘We’re awfully lucky that we lost,’ said the visiting coach, Mario Griffin, with relief.

El Salvador prevailed, three-nil.

The same armoured cars carried the Honduran team straight from the playing field to the airport. A worse fate awaited the visiting fans. Kicked and beaten, they fled towards the border. Two of them died. Scores landed in hospital. One hundred and fifty of the visitors’ cars were burned. The border between the two states was closed a few hours later.

Luis read about all of this in the newspaper and said that there was going to be a war. He had been a reporter for a long time and he knew his beat.

In Latin America, he said, the border between soccer and politics is vague. There is a long list of governments that have fallen or been overthrown after the defeat of the national team. Players on the losing team are denounced in the press as traitors. When Brazil won the World Cup in Mexico, an exiled Brazilian colleague of mine was heartbroken: ‘The military right wing,’ he said, ‘can be assured of at least five more years of peaceful rule.’ On the way to the title, Brazil beat England. In an article with the headline ‘Jesus Defends Brazil’, the Rio de Janeiro paper
Jornal dos Sportes
explained the victory thus: ‘Whenever the ball flew towards our goal and a score seemed inevitable, Jesus reached his foot out of the clouds and cleared the ball.’ Drawings accompanied the article, illustrating the supernatural intervention.

Anyone at the stadium can lose his life. Take the match that Mexico lost to Peru, two-one. An embittered Mexican fan shouted in an ironic tone, ‘
Viva
Mexico!’ A moment
later he was dead, massacred by the crowd. But sometimes the heightened emotions find an outlet in other ways. After Mexico beat Belgium one-nil, Augusto Mariaga, the warden of a maximum-security prison in Chilpancingo (Guerrero State, Mexico), became delirious with joy and ran around firing a pistol into the air and shouting, ‘
Viva
Mexico!’ He opened all the cells, releasing 142 dangerous hardened criminals. A court acquitted him later, as, according to the verdict, he had ‘acted in patriotic exaltation.’

‘Do you think it’s worth going to Honduras?’ I asked Luis, who was then editing the serious and influential weekly
Siempre
.

‘I think it’s worth it,’ he answered. ‘Something’s bound to happen.’

I was in Tegucigalpa the next morning.

At dusk a plane flew over Tegucigalpa and dropped a bomb. Everybody heard it. The nearby mountains echoed its violent blast so that some said later that a whole series of bombs had been dropped. Panic swept the city. People fled home; merchants closed their shops. Cars were abandoned in the middle of the street. A woman ran along the pavement, crying, ‘My child! My child!’ Then silence fell and everything became still. It was as if the city had died. The lights went out and Tegucigalpa sank into darkness.

I hurried to the hotel, burst into my room, fed a piece of paper into the typewriter and tried to write a dispatch to Warsaw. I was trying to move fast because I knew that at that moment I was the only foreign correspondent there and that I could be the first to inform the world about the outbreak of the war in Central America. But it was pitch dark in the room and I couldn’t see anything. I felt my way downstairs to the reception desk, where I was lent a
candle. I went back upstairs, lit the candle and turned on my transistor radio. The announcer was reading a communiqué from the Honduran government about the commencement of hostilities with El Salvador. Then came the news that the Salvadoran army was attacking Honduras all along the front line.

I began to write:

At this moment someone in the street started shouting
‘Apaga la luz!’
(‘Turn off the light!’) over and over, more and more loudly with increasing agitation. I blew out the candle. I went on typing blind, by touch, striking a match over the keys every now and then.

I carried the dispatch downstairs, found the owner of the hotel and began asking him to find someone to lead me to the post office. It was my first day there and I did not
know Tegucigalpa at all. It is not a big city—a quarter of a million people—but it lies among hills and has a maze of crabbed streets. The owner wanted to help but he had no one to send with me and I was in a hurry. In the end he called the police. Nobody at the police station had time. So he called the fire department. Three firemen arrived in full gear, wearing helmets and carrying axes. We greeted each other in the dark; I could not see their faces. I begged them to lead me to the post office. I know Honduras well, I lied, and know that its people are renowned for their hospitality. I was sure they would not refuse me. It was very important that the world find out the truth about who started the war, who shot first and I could assure them that I had written the honest truth. The main thing now was time, and we had to hurry.

We left the hotel. It was a dark night. I could see only the outlines of the street. I do not know why we spoke in whispers. I tried to remember the way and counted my steps. I was close to a thousand when the firemen stopped and one of them knocked on a door. A voice from inside asked what we wanted. Then the door opened, but only for an instant so that the light wouldn’t be seen. I was inside. They ordered me to wait: there is only one telex machine in Honduras, and the president was using it. He was engaged in an exchange with his ambassador in Washington, who would be applying to the American government for military assistance. This went on for a long time, since the president and the ambassador were using uncommonly flowery language and, besides, the connection kept breaking every so often.

After midnight I finally made contact with Warsaw. The machine typed out the number
TL
813480
PAP VARSOVIA
. I leapt up joyfully. The operator asked, ‘Is Varsovia some country?’

‘It’s not a country. It’s a city. The country is called
Polonia
.’