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Alexander Cockburn
The Politics of Hurricane Mitch
There's nothing "natural" about the awful
disaster of Hurricane Mitch. Those thousands
of lives were lost to mud, water, hunger and
disease though human agency. Hillsides
dissolved, and shanty towns vanished in the
floodwaters because of economic and political
policies, mostly imposed at the point of a
gun.
If you want to pick a date when the fate of
those thousands of poor people was sealed, it
wasn't when Hurricane Mitch began to pick up
speed off the coast of Honduras. It came 44
years ago, in 1954, when the United Fruit Co.,
now renamed Chiquita Banana, prodded the CIA
to take action against the moderately left
government of President Jacobo Arbenz in
Guatemala. Arbenz had compulsorily purchased
vast unused stretches of productive land held
by United Fruit and was planning to
redistribute it to poor peasants.
A CIA-organized coup was not long in coming.
Guatemala entered its long night. Along with
Arbenz vanished all prospect of land reform,
not merely in Guatemala but throughout Central
America. Instead, pressed most urgently by the
Kennedy administration, came the so-called
"export model" of development.
Through the next 30 years in Central America,
small peasants were pushed off their
traditional holdings by local oligarchs flush
with money and military equipment furnished by
the United States. The peasants had no option
but to migrate to forested hillsides too steep
to be of interest to oligarchs and foreign
companies that had seized the bottom lands.
Year after year, the peasants tried to ward
off starvation, raising subsistence crops on
slopes so extreme that sometimes, in
photographs from El Salvador, one comes across
a peasant working his land while tied to a
stake, so he won't slip. In such manner, the
trees got cut down and the land worked and
overworked, until a tropical storm would send
the bare hillsides careening down in deadly
mud slides.
Tens of thousands of other peasant families,
forced off the good land, moved into Managua
or Tegucigalpa or other towns and cities. The
consequent shanty towns burgeoned along river
banks, on precarious flood basins where at
least the inhabitants had access to water. As
with the degraded hillsides, these shanty
towns were deathtraps, awaiting the
inevitable.
There were plenty of auguries and warnings. In
1982, a mud slide on Monte Bello in El
Salvador killed over a thousand displaced
peasants who had moved there and deforested
the mountain slopes to grow food and get fuel.
In the mid-1980s, the U.S. Agency for
International Development reported that across
5.5 million acres in Honduras, the soil was
eroding at an average rate of 40 to 200 metric
tons per acre a year.
Geology and social displacement tell us the
cause. In Honduras, more than 75 percent of
the land has lopes greater than 25 percent.
The sharper slopes were all that the peasants
were allowed to farm, though the terrain is
entirely unsuited to agriculture.
At the time he was driven out by revolution,
Anastasio Somoza, propped up for years by the
United States, owned 20 percent of Nicaragua's
farm land. In El Salvador, 2 percent of the
population held 60 percent of the farm land.
The Sandinistas who evicted Somoza promptly
embarked on efforts to redistribute land to
the peasants. Though such efforts were patchy,
particularly in the north, their attempts to
revive forests and to restore the integrity of
the land won the Sandinistas international
acclaim. Not for long. The United States put
an end to all that, driving the Sandinistas
into an increasingly desperate state of siege.
In El Salvador and Honduras, death squads cut
down rural organizers.
So, for years now, those worn hillsides and
flood plains through Central America have been
awaiting Mitch. Even in the 1980s, storms were
inflicting $40 million to $50 million in
damage each year in the region due to flooding
and consequent damage to infrastructure. In
the highland regions of El Salvador and
Guatemala, the land is in even sorrier shape
than in Honduras and Nicaragua before the
onslaught of hurricane Mitch. The only way
forward is for the peasants to be given good
agricultural land and adequate financial
resources. That's even less likely now than it
was in 1954.
Humans caused the disaster just as humans made
sure that the governments of Nicaragua and
Honduras were incapable of responding to the
catastrophe. After a decade of "structural
adjustment" imposed by the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund and USAID, these
governments are hollow shells, mutilated by
enforced cutbacks.
Comes a hurricane and how can you begin
evacuation if there's no money for gasoline,
no vehicles, skeleton staffs, no vaccines, not
even the ability to stockpile drinking water?
How can you battle epidemics when the
ministries of health have been decimated? How
can you rebuild when the ministries of works
have been similarly cut back?
So the Honduran government didn't put the
country on alert. It simply hoped the
hurricane would go away. After structural
adjustment, that's about all it could do.
A couple of years ago, hurricane Lili struck
Cuba. The government had evacuated thousands,
stockpiled sandbags, positioned back-up
generators and rallied medics. When Lili moved
on, thousands of homes had been destroyed,
less than half a dozen lives lost. Just
recently, the right-wing President Aleman of
Nicaragua refused offers of help from Fidel
Castro, making disparaging remarks about
Cuba's political system and saying,
incredibly, that Nicaragua needed even greater
disciplines of the free market to recover from
the disaster. There's a bleak truth Aleman and
many others should reflect upon: "Natural"
disasters are nature's judgment on what humans
have wrought.
Alexander Cockburn is co-author, with Jeffrey
St. Clair, of "Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and
the Press," published this fall by Verso. His
column appears weekly in NewsBite courtesy of
Creators Syndicate.
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