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