Editing Football War (section)

==Background==
{{More citations needed section|date=August 2024}}

Although the nickname "Football War" implies that the conflict was due to a [[Association football|football]] match, the causes of the war went much deeper. The roots were issues over land reform in [[Honduras]] and immigration and demographic problems in [[El Salvador]]. Honduras has more than five times the area of neighboring El Salvador, but in 1969 the population of El Salvador (3.7 million) was 40 percent larger than that of Honduras (2.6 million). At the beginning of the 20th century, Salvadorans had begun migrating to Honduras in large numbers. By 1969, more than 300,000 Salvadorans were living in Honduras, making up more than 10% of Honduras's population.<ref name="banana">{{Cite book |last=Acker |first=Alison |url=https://archive.org/details/hondurasmakingof0000acke/page/n7/mode/2up |title=Honduras: The Making of a Banana Republic |publisher=Between the Lines |year=1988 |isbn=9780919946880 |location=Toronto |pages=92–93 |access-date=1 June 2024 |url-access=registration |via=[[Internet Archive]]}}</ref>

In Honduras, as in much of Central America, a large majority of the land was owned by large landowners or big corporations. The [[United Fruit Company]] owned 10% of the land, making it hard for the average landowner to compete. In 1966, United Fruit banded together with many other large companies{{Specify|date=June 2024}} to create the National Federation of Honduran Farmers and Ranchers ({{Langx|es|Federación Nacional de Agricultores y Ganaderos de Honduras}}, FENAGH). This group put pressure on the [[President of Honduras]], General [[Oswaldo López Arellano]], to protect the property of wealthy landowners from ''[[Peasant#Latin American farmers|campesinos]]'', many of which were Salvadoran.<ref name="Anderson-1981">{{Cite book |last=Anderson |first=Thomas P. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=fpNqAAAAMAAJ |title=The War of the Dispossessed: Honduras and El Salvador, 1969 |publisher=University of Nebraska Press |year=1981 |isbn=9780803210097 |edition=illustrated |location=Lincoln |access-date=1 June 2024}}</ref>{{RP|64–75}}

In 1962, Honduras successfully enacted a new [[land reform]] law.<ref>{{Cite news |date=5 December 1962 |title=El Congreso National decreta la siguiente... |trans-title=The National Congress decrees the following... |url=http://lcweb5.loc.gov/glin/jurisdictions/Honduras/pdfs/155709-206648.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150224201803/http://lcweb5.loc.gov/glin/jurisdictions/Honduras/pdfs/155709-206648.pdf |archive-date=24 February 2015 |work=La Gaceta |language=es |via=lcweb5.loc.gov}}</ref> Fully enforced by 1967, this law gave the central government and municipalities much of the land occupied illegally by Salvadoran immigrants and redistributed it to native-born Hondurans. The land was taken from both immigrant farmers and [[squatting|squatters]] regardless of their claims to ownership or immigration status. This created problems for Salvadorans and Hondurans who were married. Thousands of Salvadoran laborers were expelled from Honduras, including both migrant workers and longer-term settlers. This general rise in tensions ultimately led to a military conflict.<ref>{{Cite web |title=July 14, 1969: Soccer War |url=https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/soccer-war/ |access-date=2025-02-24 |website=Zinn Education Project |language=en-US}}</ref>