
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 Salvadorean newspaper El Nacional the next day.
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The Soccer War lasted one hundred hours. Its victims: 6,000 dead, more than 12,000 wounded. Fifty thousand people lost their home and fields. Many villages were destroyed. The two countries ceased military activity because Latin American states intervened, but to this day there are exchanges of gunfire along the Honduras-El Salvador border, and people die, and villages are burned.
Kapuscinski/Soccer
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