HURRICANE MITCH AND NICARAGUA

The following is a brief synopsis of a long article which appeared in the November edition of the Nicaraguan magazine Envio (vol 17, No. 208).

Nature can be a bully sometimes. She likes to kick poor countries when they're down. In the western Hemisphere, no country except Haiti is poorer than Nicaragua, and no country except Honduras was harder hit by Hurricane Mitch. Over the previous quarter century, Nicaragua had suffered an earthquake that levelled the capital, Managua, killing ten thousand; a revolutionary war against Somoza; a counterrevolutionary war against the Sandinistas; Hurricane Joan; and a devastating tidal wave. Then came Mitch which, without ever blowing directly over Nicaragua, nevertheless caused enough rain to kill up to four thousand people, destroy thousands of kilometers of road and a third of the country's crops, in addition to destroying or damaging up to 800,000 homes. Forty hurricanes hit Nicaragua in the 20th century. Mitch's visit to neighbouring Honduras caused far more destruction in Nicaragua - mainly in the north - than any of the hurricanes that actually hit the country directly. In the mountainous province of Jinotega, rainfall was a thousand times the October average.

The rio Coco is Nicaragua's longest river. In Quilali, just north of the river, a brand new baseball stadium, built at great cost and with much sacrifice, was ready for its grand opening. The river rose and washed it away. In Wiwili, the Coco destroyed 2,500 of the 2,800 houses. In the thickly forested area ear the Atlantic coast in the northeast, 70 Miskito commuities lost their homes.

In Posoltega, in the province of Chinandega, the Italy-Nicaragua Association had already chosen the names for the new schools it was about to build for the local children in the shadow of the extinct 1,400-metre volcano called Casita. For four consecutive days, rain caused by Mitch poured into the crater lake atop the mountain. Then, at midday on October 30th, the crater rim gave way and a huge avalanche of water, mud and rocks buried two thousand people in eight villages.

The hurricane broke 70 bridges. It also broke the back of the false image of a new, booming Nicaragua so laboriously constructed over the previous months by the neoliberal government of President Miguel aleman. What comfortable northern tourist or investor will now be interested in a destroyed country whose chronicpoverty as well as its present disaster has been so widely portrayed on the world's TV screens?

The government dithered for days about declaring an emergency, fearing any deviation from policies imposed by its foreign masters who hold the purse-strings.

Now, as the bodies emerge from the mud, the danger of disease rides in like yet another apocalyptic horseman: malaria, dengue, leptospirosis, cholera, and myriad infections are all real dangers.

International aid has been quick to arrive, saving countless lives and fending off catastrophe in the short term. But the long-term outlook is more worrying: infrastructure and crops destroyed, people flocking to the cities, an internal market destabilised by destruction and food aid, are all phenomena liable to affect the country for years. The 1972 earthquake hastened the demise of Somoza. Did the 1998 rainquake mark the beginning of the end of the fat man's friend, Miguel Aleman? Only time will tell, and Nicaraguans have, if nothing else, at least plenty of that.