Nicaragua's Structural Hurricane

...Nicaragua is a country that was ruined by war, and then was ruined again with excess debt payment and structural-adjustment policies that drastically reduced the capacity of government to govern...

...9. Envio (Managua), June 1999...

...Donors have long harbored serious doubts about the cronyism and corruption that characterizes the central government in Nicaragua...

...This one doesn't...

...Just last year, government authorities reported that there were some 18,000 forest fires over the course of the dry season...

...could not be touched and that the purpose of debt cancellation was to better allow the government to comply with its terms...

...7. The Economist, November 14, 1998...

...Dominance in the New Global Order (Interlink Press, 1996...

...Primitive slash-andburn techniques and uncontrollable fires in the summer of 1997 took a huge toll on the forests...

...they would have migrated...

...Prevention-that is, structurally addressing the man-made dimensions of disasters-would certainly be more expensive than relief...

...In effect, the first deliveries of relief aid had a way of winding up in the hands of Liberal Party-dominated entities while having strange difficulties reaching Sandinista municipal governments...

...It was an opportunity lost...

...4 Under these disadvantaged conditions, Survivors Nicaragua and similarly impoverished a makesh countries might as well live in a permanent state of emergency every time the rain appears to be excessive...

...2. Interview with Jaime Incer in La Prensa (Managua), November 9, 1998...

...Bangladesh suffered huge floods the year prior to Mitch but there was hardly a blip on international television screens...

...Poverty and joblessness have forced 40% of the economically active population to seek work outside the country...

...The central government basically ignored the weather service and civil defense reports, playing down the first warnings and instead advising Nicaraguan citizens that this was a localized phenomenon with no serious national implications...

...Deprived of thick vegetation, mountain slopes no longer hold back water but instead simply produce mud and mudslides, inundating plains, valleys and lower zones...

...One wonders what would have happened without the photographers and television crews...

...Perhaps we were never so aware of how a fixation on macroeconomics entails giving Nature a free hand to commit a class-discriminating genocide against the poor in poor countries...

...government backing and blackmail tactics...

...When there is flooding, rivers overflow and create new tributaries overnight, sweeping away everything in their wake...

...were already displaced...

...He is author of several books, includ- ing La mistica de Sandino (Centro de Estudios Internacionales, 1994) and Power Lines: U.S...

...Still the order for the state of alert was not issued...

...True prevention begins with information and organization, but it does not end there: It also requires funding...

...What will future archeologists discover there...

...The structural-adjustment programs imposed on poor nations by Washington and the international financial institutions create dependency and impoverishment...

...Even the Nicaraguan government goes out of its way to subsiVOL XXXIII, No 2 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1999 17REPORT ON CENTRAL AMERICA dize sugar production on the big commercial estates...

...But one need not be a Sandinista to know that many UN relief operations would not kick in without such a legal declaration...

...He was the Ambas- sador to the UN and Secretary General of the Nicaraguan For- eign Ministry under the Sandinista Government in 1981-82 and 1984-1990 respectively...

...And while limited institutional responses are often directly linked to structures of poverty and incompetent government, there is also an international context to these problems...

...This is the UN-declared International Decade for the Reduction of Natural Disasters...

...How else can we stanch the systemic globalized mudslide that is burying the poor the world over...

...8 A World Bank study based on the 1995 census found that 82.3% of the population lived in conditions of generalized poverty...

...And why only by this sort of horror, a dramatic, photogenic natural disaster (or rarely, famine...

...Honduras may require new homes for an estimated 1.4 million people, about 25% of the population...

...A less intense earthquake in Managua in 1972 left 15,000 victims...

...5. "Mitch: Hurachn Politico del Presidente," Confidencial (Managua), November 8-14, 1998...

...An earthquake measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale shook up California in 1992, but only one person died...

...For more than two decades, societies and governments have ignored the warnings of geographers and ecologists about the unstable character of volcanic soils that are rich but also susceptible to severe erosion and shifts, making them inappropriate for human settlement...

...Land is being handed back to Somoza-era land barons, particularly those who acquired U.S...

...Eight months after relief assistance began to be distributed in Nicaragua, populations continued to cling to the food handouts, not only because of the dislocations caused by Mitch but also because of joblessness and poverty...

...President Alemin was uncharacteristically honest in saying that his government was determined to comply at any cost with the structural-adjustment plan, building up the reserves mandated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and slashing budgets on "nonessential" services...

...Thousands of workers are being dismissed...

...The Nicaraguan government's inadequate response has been to create 10,000 temporary jobs with a weekly salary of just $9.6 Highly publicized media images of the catastrophe jarred people and governments around the world...

...Hurricane Mitch hit the poorest part of Central America, leaving thou- sands dead and inflicting devastating damage...

...More than 3,000 people were killed by Mitch in Nicaragua and at least 1,200 hurt...

...A hurricane or natural disaster hits two equally populated territories with the same force...

...The army-that legacy of the Sandinista revolution still hated by many right-wingers-never looked so good...

...This was the case in Cuba a few weeks prior to Mitch when a hurricane swept across the country with only minimal loss of life thanks to a concerned and responsive government...

...The first is a calamity, but the second-the absence of preventive organizations, the failure to properly alert communities, and the lack of adequate preparations to preserve lives and property-is criminal...

...The answer is essentially political...

...8. "Desnutrici6n es Amenaza Nacional," El Nuevo Diario (Managua), June 2, 1999...

...The government and the FSLN saw best to play their cards conservatively and request what seemed to them viable and not what was politically, socially and morally warranted: 100% cancellation and grant-based relief aid...

...Lest we believe that Nature or God has an unjust, neoliberal class bias, one would have to conclude that poverty and bad government kill more than natural disasters...

...As the European Network on Debt and Development noted, "While debt relief could be accelerated under HIPC, this does not change the fact that 'relief' will continue to be tied to adherence to a suicidal austerity program defined by the IMF...

...As a New York Times reporter remarked, "Some countries work, some don't...

...Little did the campesinos of Posoltega know that when they tilled the soil they were also digging their own graves...

...Granada came back, but Posoltega will not...

...In the Caribbean Basin, more furious weather phenomena have struck Florida and Cuba, but the human toll has Alejandro Bendafia is founder and president of the Center for International Studies based in Managua...

...9 As international emergency assistance began to pour into Nicaragua and Honduras, it became difficult to distinguish between emergency victims of Hurricane Mitch and the survivors of the structural hurricane of impoverishment...

...There is some exaggeration in such a statement, but not NAC8A REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 18REPORT ON CENTRAL AMERICA much...

...We do not know how many lives could have been saved, but it is certain that Nicaraguan authorities acted irresponsibly and that little was done properly either before, during or after the disaster...

...We may be unable to answer this question, but it is almost certain that with proper government backing, more people would have been available to prevent the worst...

...ing the mountain slope like a sled, ever so ready to quicken instead of holding back earth displacements provoked by rains...

...In addition, there are catastrophic losses of crops that are the backbone of the economy...

...been minimal...

...They propose monitoring corporations, the governments, the multilateral bodies...

...While Honduran President Carlos Flores declared an emergency and took to the media and contacted international organizations to demand immediate attention and support, his Nicaraguan colleague across the border acted as if nothing out of the ordinary were going on...

...The fault does not lie exclusively with Alemin...

...He authored the November/December 1978 issue of NACLA Report on the Americas, "Crisis in Nicaragua...

...7 The truth was and is that a majority of Nicaraguans were already below the poverty line...

...Small wonder that several international agencies had misgivings about turning over relief aid and responsibilities for aid distribution to government entities...

...In the following days, communities were flooded and bridges were washing away, yet still no state of alert...

...According to the UN, 80% of Nicaragua's municipalities are not prepared to meet new natural disasters...

...This was three days after Mitch assumed hurricane dimensions and some European aid agencies began pulling their people out of risky areas...

...Why was the police budget cut...

...his was a disaster foretold...

...This past June, the heavy hurricanes meteorologists predicted for 1999 hit Posoltega and other surrounding towns again, beseiging the 2,000 survivors of Mitch living in precarious refugee shelters...

...During his visit to Managua just after the storm in November 1998, IMF director Michel Camdessus insisted on the same...

...When Hurricane Joan crossed war-ravaged Nicaragua ten years ago, the Sandinista-led government gave ample warning and support for evacuation to even the most isolated communities along the Atlantic Coast...

...The scope of the devastation can be explained principally in socioecological terms: the impact of impoverishment and the agro-ecological destruction that it helps generate lead to a situation where heavy rainfall leaves behind thousands dead, one million homeless, and 40% of the country's agrarian production in tatters...

...2 Something is dreadfully wrong when a rain precipitation of less than 40 inches can create such havoc...

...And we ask: Where is justice, where is restitution, where is the structural transformation that we all need...

...Its response to Mitch, while welcome, pales in comparison with the estimated $15 billion it spent waging war in Central America (half to destroy and enfeeble Nicaragua...

...Estimates of long-term damage are still preliminary, but the costs will surely be monumental and long-lasting...

...m While there was sufficient warning from the weather 16 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 16REPORT ON CENTRAL AMERICA service and civil defense about the possible consequences of Mitch, less than 80 miles from Managua entire villages were buried alive...

...Cheap roads and cheap bridges fell apart quickly, so when hundreds of communities were cut off and many people were calling for help from tree tops and roofs, the government had a total of four Russian-made military transport helicopters to its name...

...According to a recent World Food Program and UNICEF report, 24% of Nicaraguan children under six suffer from physical maldevelopment due to chronic malnutrition...

...Only on October 30-four days after the deluge began-was the National Emergency Committee set up, giving the go ahead for national emergency planning.5 Would things have turned out differently had there been greater sensitivity, efficiency and responsibility on the part of the government...

...Would an ounce of prevention have saved pounds of relief...

...They rob people and their governments of the capacity to comply with the elementary responsibility to provide for the general welfare of their societies...

...They challenge the details and sometimes the manifestation of savage capitalism, but not the essence and structural roots of this economic savagery...

...President Reagan sent nuclear aircraft carriers and battle ships, while Congress approved some $100 million for the Contras to wage war...

...Posoltega was buried four days after the heavy rain reached critical dimensions...

...It is not "El Nifio" or global climate change...

...The elementary foundations of governmental presence-such as civil defense structures, police, fire brigades and health clinics, not to mention minimally empowered municipal entities-simply either did not exist or were woefully understaffed, undertrained and underpaid with little or no communication links with the capital or with central authorities...

...We know that our countries and communities suffer in the form of historical transfer of resources from South to North...

...Indeed, in the weeks after what happens Mitch, the president of the n reach of its Nicaraguan Central Bank said that the ESAF program crews...

...conqueror William Walker, who had proclaimed himself president of Nicaragua, because it attempted to resist his imperial plans...

...But what about neoliberal economics, debt dependence and strucA Nicaraguan family stands in front of their home, which was destroyed by flooding from Mitch...

...The people of Posoltega died primarily because they were poor and mostly destitute...

...We know that neoliberal economics and politics kills-that it takes the form of structural violence in the form of high infant mortality rates, malnutrition, denied rights to health and education, and so on...

...Impoverishment in turn is the product of a development model that pays tribute abroad in the form of unfair terms of trade and declining prices for primary exports, mounting interest rates on the foreign debt, and a highly regressive taxation system...

...After the hurricane, plans are underway in both Nicaragua and Honduras to accelerate the pace and broaden the scope of privatization...

...Governments may not be able to prevent the material damage (homes, bridges, etc...

...They had few possessions, barely scratching a living out of a landscape that is no longer recognizable...

...Those in nearby agricultural settlements also died, forced to migrate over the years on account of poverty, unfair land distribution, and an export-oriented economy that substitutes cotton for orchards and forests, leaving the countryside barren...

...Take the United States...

...Fifty-two percent of the victims were children.' Posoltega may Pompeii of the century...

...he town of Posoltega lays buried under mountains of mud, one of the many disasters caused by Hurricane Mitch in the north and central regions of Nicaragua...

...Even the Weather Channel was issuing serious warnings about what Alemin termed a "little excess rain...

...Had they not been, then they would not have been living on the eroded hillsides that washed away with the heavy rains...

...citizenship and can count on U.S...

...What this means is that what happened in Posoltega last year can and probably will happen again in other towns located on similarly unstable soil...

...Winning early entry into the HIPC plan would enable Alemin to use debt "relief' as a political trump card in the next election on behalf of his chosen successor...

...6. "Destrucci6n en el Campo Aumentar6 el Desempleo," La Prensa (Managua), November 12, 1998...

...No, he said, such a mobilization would be something that the Sandinistas would do-and he was certainly no Sandinista...

...Why was the civil defense budget request rejected...

...3 The result is an internal commercial system that allows big merchants inappropriate profits that in reality belong to the campesino producer...

...Poverty and dislocation contributed to the environmental devastation that turns unusual weather patterns like Mitch into catastrophes...

...Liberalization means that most basic foodstuffs can be freely imported, thereby undermining small farmers, while the industrial countries insist on protecting their own farmers...

...So when new hurricanes or earthquakes hit countries like Nicaragua-as they surely will-they will still be ill-prepared to mount viable prevention programs on their own...

...They could have done much more, but their budget request had been cut by two-thirds, leaving Nicaragua on a per capita basis one of the least policed countries in the world...

...While 54 of Nicaragua's 143 municipalities are classified as highly vulnerable to flooding, due to budget cuts only 37 of those 54 had an active civil defense unit...

...These are questions we must answer...

...4. "El Fondo Monetario, Ecol6gico y Social del Desastre," El Nuevo Diario (Managua), November 10, 1999...

...And why try so hard to comply with the IMF's Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF) and even exceed some of its requirements...

...There are always those-beginning with the neoliberals themselves-who claim that capital and markets, like God, work in mysterious ways and that these rules of the market economy cannot be questioned...

...While government officials and business tycoons speak wonders of the benefits of debt cancellation, structural-adjustment proht for the rich grams that inhibit develop- ment are in fact an integral osity to be so part of the HIPC scheme...

...In contrast we say let us transform them and if need be dismantle them and create people-centered as opposed to U.S./corporate/capital-oriented instruments of power...

...of natural disasters, but effective organization coordinated by governments and civil organizations can prevent unnecessary loss of human life...

...Who was going to take the Nicaraguan plight seriously if the country's own president did not...

...We cannot control Nature...

...Men, women and children, all poor, buried alive, clutching each other...

...But un there were no there, only poi Nature can provoke disasters and so can human-created political structures...

...tural adjustment...

...Like many in the so-called poor countries, most Nicaraguans barely survive from day to day, victims of the structural and permanent hurricane that takes the form of joblessness, extreme poverty, absence of health care and malnutrition, resulting in more deaths-off camera-than the toll taken by a single flood...

...To make matters worse, as in e twentieth most of Nicaragua, the people of Posoltega took the ax to the like Pompeii, remaining forests for firevealthy living wood-they could not afford gas or kerosene stoves-leavor migrants...

...Nicaragua needs about a million homes for about 20% of the population...

...Still, President Arnoldo Alemdn resisted the recommendations of many, including several ministers, to declare a state of national emergency and proceed with mass evacuation and rescue efforts...

...The hurricane on the one hand and the groundswell of Western sympathy on the other, combined with the positive press received by the Jubilee 2000 debt-relief campaign--made the demand not only realistic but politically viable...

...Paying up to 10% monthly interest rates, campesinos are also driven to mountainside cultivation and forest destruction because of the land reform reversal that has taken place under the Chamorro and Alemdn governments...

...But how are Third World governments supposed to pay for the implementation of the minimal UN guidelines calling for strategies including exhaustive risk evaluation, early warning systems, and preparations to mitigate human suffering in case of a natural disaster...

...As the London weekly The Economist asked, "Can it be right for the rich world's generosity to be so conditioned by what happens to occur within reach of its camera crews...

...Illiteracy in rural areas is up to 42.8%-a two-fold increase over 1985 levels...

...Structural adjustment means depriving campesinos of access to alternative credit schemes, since state-owned banks have been privatized and restrictions are imposed on development-oriented nongovernmental organizations (NGOs...

...And why does it take more time to recover in one than in the other...

...The police-the only representative of the state in many communities-did a heroic job...

...Yet we can control governments and government-dominated multilateral bodies...

...Equally disturbing are the arguments made by a new brand of left neoliberals, who contend that we should be "pragmatic" and accept the realities and limits of current power relationships...

...Nicaraguan debt payments are greater than half of all national revenues, and sustaining the debt payments-the primary reason for the existence of structural-adjustment programs in the first place-has meant that public agencies have had to cut expenditures between 30% and 90% in real terms since 1994...

...If one human being takes the life of another, such an offense is punishable by law...

...3. "Recovery for Nicaragua and Honduras," Oxfam International Briefing Paper, November 16, 1998...

...People took to settling on the slopes of volcanoes, VOL X)(XIII...

...Available on-line at <http://www.oneworld.org/eurodad/mitch2gb.htm...

...As the bankers say, "Who pays...

...Alemin played meteorologist in front of television cameras, assuring everyone that the little drizzle would soon pass...

...Why is it that the human damage can be so much higher in one place than in another...

...Nicaragua did work, but for and within the neoliberal framework of irresponsible dismantling of state institutional capacities and misguided spending limitations which undermined civil defense and prevention structures...

...But when Daniel Ortega began complaining about this political discrimination, it simply served to reinforce the impression that party politics, not the public well-being, was what most concerned the country's political leaders...

...he costs associated with Mitch are staggering...

...O Reconstruction support--chiefly in the form of loans rather than donations--continues to be tied to "sound" economic policies, and the famous debt-relief program has turned out to be debt rescheduling with write-offs limited to "debt overhang"--debt that was unpayable anyway...

...Indeed, Posoltega may well be the Pompeii of the twentieth century-a symbol of the fate of the nations of the South...

...Unlike Pompeii, there were no wealthy living in Posoltega and no palaces-just humble housing, often made of unplastered adobe dirt bricks that disintegrate when in contact with water...

...In the 1850s, the town of Granada was burnt to the ground by U.S...

...See "Strange Bedfellows: The Alemin-Ortega Pact," p. 20.] In part, the Alemdn government deliberately tried to play down the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Mitch because it did not want to scare international investors or give the Bretton Woods institutions the appearance that the country might fall into arrears...

...The answer, "Can it be rigid world's gener conditioned by to occur withi camera the President said, was the debt-reduction plan of the multilateral banks for the most heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC...

...Nicaragua's Structural Hurricane 1. "Pobreza Reina en la Regi6n Atl~ntica," La Prensa (Managua), May 23, 1999...

...And no doubt, emergency assistance is much more congenial and "safe" than addressing the structural dimensions of the national enfeeblement predominant in the so-called Third World...

...Walker left behind a sign saying, "This was Granada...

...The next day the army reported that 30,000 of the Casitas mudslide at El Ojochal, Nicaragua place flowers by ift cross for their dead...

...European Network on Debt and Development (EURODAD), "Central America Update: Welcome to the New Honduras and Nicaragua," November 1998...

...No 2 SEPTEMBER/OCrOBER 1999 17 often ill-advised by irresponsiwell be the ble land-distribution policies...

...As international assistance began to pour into Nicaragua it became difficult to distinguish between emergency victims of Hurricane Mitch and the survivors of the structural hurricane of impoverishment...

...The heaviest rainfall took place on October 27...