For 27 years, the Honduran national soccer team played under the shadows of past glory, suffering heartbreaking defeats that have weighed on the nation’s psyche.

But on Oct. 14, a last minute flick of a head on the final day of World Cup qualifiers erased those nearly three decades of anguish—and triggered euphoria across a nation embroiled in political and economic distress.

Rodolfo F. Pastor, a visiting professor of history at Harvard, understands how the identity and culture of Honduras—a nation obsessed with soccer—has evolved alongside the country’s political and economic misfortunes. Until recently, Pastor served as the Honduran Minister of Culture under President Jose Manuel Zelaya. Pastor was forced to flee the country this past summer when a military coup ousted Zelaya’s administration.

“Sports have been always been a gateway of building identity, a collective identity,” Pastor says. “Hondurans have a very grievous problem derived from socioeconomic and political circumstances. It is a problem with their self-esteem; with the idea of who they are and what it means to be Honduran.”

Pastor says he believes that the recent success of the Honduran soccer team has helped to unify the nation and temporarily mitigate underlying social tensions. But he also worries that politicians may exploit and manipulate the team for their own ends.

“In all different and important positions, left and right, people will try to manipulate the image of this triumph and use it for their own very perverse purposes,” Pastor says. “You can see it in the way people project to take the ‘selecionados,’ the heroes of the story, into their photo op[s].”

He also expressed fears that the soccer team’s success will be used to obscure more pressing concerns in Honduras, such as the widespread poverty that persists in much of the nation.

“A country should not be built on the idea that we can produce athletes,” Pastor says. “We have to build a country where we have opportunities for people to stay [in the country], be productive, and lead happy lives.”

‘INFERIORITY COMPLEX’

For decades, Honduras has been marred by systemic economic underachievement and unexpected natural calamities. These issues have contributed to the development of what Pastor calls a national “inferiority complex”—a problem that he says has been reflected in the national team’s struggle to qualify for the World Cup.

In 2005, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) estimated that 22 percent of the Honduran population lived in extreme poverty, earning less than $1.25 a day. The World Bank, which ranked Honduras as the third poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, estimated in 2007 that over 59 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.

These economic concerns have been exacerbated by natural disasters, including the category five Hurricane Mitch that devastated the Caribbean Sea in 1998. The United States Geological Survey said the hurricane caused upwards of $3 billion in damages and over 7,000 casualties, destroyed large portions of the nation’s transportation infrastructure, and wiped out 70 percent of the nation’s crops.

“The basic problem [of Honduras’ national inferiority complex] is rooted in the fact that so many people do not have opportunities to develop themselves or their skills and virtues for a particular vocation,” Pastor says. “They do not receive the education, the nutrition, the basic health care that one needs to develop as a person.”

‘FÚTBOL NATION’

For a nation of seven million conditioned to distress, soccer has often served as the only means to escape the severities of reality.