A Legacy of War Unearthed
Canales, Duben
On November 16, 1998, 12-year-old Bernardo GonzAlez went for a swim in a pond near Puerto Viejo, in north-central Nicaragua. The boy's outing proved fatal. He dived into the water, hitting a...
...in a shorter three-year period, there were 500 casualties in just two Nicaraguan hospitals near Managua...
...Many more casualties go unreported...
...The children like to throw rocks into the well and explode them...
...Locals have tried to demine the field, with disastrous results...
...This is the most heavily mined region in Latin America, the result of the military strategies of lowintensity conflict and guerrilla warfare in the 1980s and early 1990s...
...The UN has held classes for some 23,000 children in Nicaragua, which includes the distribution of a comic book featuring Superman and Wonder Woman warning children about the dangers of landmines...
...In Honduras there has been almost no effort to establish community awareness regarding landmines...
...Arms caches stored or buried by Contras during the peace process have also been unearthed by the hurricane's downpour, and mortar rounds, grenades and rockets lie strewn across fields, forests and rivers...
...Various communities in Nicaragua have complained about the priority given to strategic military infrastructure in the defining effort rather than in civilian, especially rural, areas...
...The joint Honduran-Nicaraguan module of the Mission for the Removal of Landmines in Central America has concentrated its efforts primarily in heavily mined areas around infrastructure and public services, such as washed-out bridges, fallen electrical cables and communications towers...
...Three-quarters of the victims are children...
...We tried to demine the area, says Heriberto Bermudez, a foreman at the farm, "but we would only sink the mines into the bottom of a well...
...Clearance of the 73,000 mines dotting Honduras and Nicaragua has now been complicated by the torrential rains of Mitch, which have displaced the mines into waterways and rivers, making them extremely difficult to locate...
...Before the hurricane, Honduras registered 200 deaths and an untold number of casualties between 1990 and 1995...
...Until there is a concerted effort on the part of national governments, international agencies and local communities, the legacy of war in Central America will continue stealing the lives of young and old alike...
...In the wake of the hurricane, strategic priority was given to these areas in order to rebuild and reestablish communication with the border areas...
...The Sandinistas put fences and warnings around the minefields to protect civilians, but these as well as thousands of mines were flushed into the rivers of the Segovias...
...He dived into the water, hitting a floating landmine that had been scattered by Hurricane Mitch, which hit the region two weeks earlier...
...Such educational campaigns are useful but hardly sufficient, particularly since Mitch has delayed cleanup of the landmines by at least five years...
...Thousands of landmines were placed around the bridges in northern Nicaragua to protect infrastructure from marauding Contra irregulars...
...This situation highlights a desperate need for greater cooperation between international agencies engaged in demining efforts and the affected communities...
...For example, while the area around the Esquirin bridge in Matagalpa was demined, a nearby farm known as La Misi6n, which has a large unmarked minefield that has already claimed four lives, has not been cleaned up...
...This is a horrific but not uncommon scenario in the mountainous region of the Segovias that serves as the natural border between Honduras and Nicaragua...
...He died three days later...
Vol. 33 • September 1999 • No. 2
