WORSE THAN A WAR IN HONDURAS
For Trocaire, this disaster means a decade of work has been lost and
hundreds of people helped by Trocaire and the Irish people have been
killed. Some 29 Trocaire projects have been wiped out and another 30 in
health and agriculture made meaningless.
Thus wrote Sally O'Neill in the Irish Times on November 4. Trocaire's
Central America representative, based in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa,
was describing the aftermath, not of a war, but of Hurricane Mitch.
The hurricane affected Honduras, Nicarague, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico
and Belize, more or less in that order of seriousness. Two years' average
rainfall fell on Honduras in five days, causing the worst flooding in two
centuries. Up to 11,000 may have died - well over half in Honduras.
With a reported per capita GNP of $600, nearly six million Hondurans pay an
average of $100 per person per year in debt service, so much does this
impoverished nation owe. The shambolic economy which existed before Mitch
has been all but obliterated by the hurricane which flooded half the
country and ruined up to three-quarters of the crops. About 90 bridges
were destroyed, and five airports put out of action. A million people were
made homeless. Electricity, water and telephone systems sustained massive
damage. As the floodwaters receded, a diseased landscape of dead animals
and uprooted trees emerged, like somethingout of a painting by Salvador
Dali.
With a population of 800,000, Tegucigalpa is bisected by the huge river
Choluteca, which rose alarmingly, smashing bridges and destroying whole
neighbourhoods. Mudslides caused by rain did the rest, as thousands of
shacks slid down off the hills on which they had precariously perched.
The following is an extract from Facing up to Mitch, an article by Jon Snow
in the Guardian on November 9:
There's something that veers between utopia and hell about Central America.
Graham Greene caught it. As someone who reported in the 1980s in
Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala and saw the old Cold
Warriors use the region for their power play, I caught it too. Now the
region challenges the "new world order" as never before. This catastrophe
is not simply unfolding in America's back yard, it is most poignantly in
ours. We leave its resolution to the US government at our peril. The
military aid relationship down the years is part of theinfrastructure that
delivered death squad-deployingdictatorships. The post cold warperiod has
been a time when these countries beganto emerge from the 20th century
shadow of the American fruit companies, and US backed military dominance of
power. The danger now is that limited American band aid will redevelop
those old relationships and that the suffering people will be left two
ecades back from where they were before Hurricane Mitch struck.
The European response so far has been a ship here, ú500,000 there.
Death and displacement on this scale in Central America demand a responseon
a different scale.
Though I have never set foot in Honduras, I think I know what Snow means by
"US backed military dominance of power". Some yers ago in the United
States, a former marine described to me, without being asked, what it had
been like to serve in Honduras in the 1980s, helping the local military to
hunt, torture and kill Honduran rebels while awaiting Reagan's order to
cross the Nicaraguan border and face death against the Sandinistas.
Afflicted by desperate poverty and a traitorous ruling class, Honduras was
ripe for this kind of prostitution, hiring itself out as a US base in
return for limited economic gain and help in repressing elements of its own
population. Snow's point would seem to be that, if Europe does not help
sufficiently with reconstruction, Honduras could fall that low again, even
in a post Cold War world.
Donations: (01) 662-1784.
Cheques andpostal orders:
Central America Hurricane Relief Appeal,
LASC,
5 Merrion Row,
Dublin