A hurricane or natural disaster hits two equally populated territories with the same force. Why is it that the human damage can be so much higher in one place than in another? And why does it take more time to recover in one than in the other?
The answer is essentially political. Hurricane Mitch hit the poorest part of Central America, leaving thousands dead and inflicting devastating damage. In the Caribbean Basin, more furious weather phenomena have struck Florida and Cuba, but the human toll has been minimal. An earthquake measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale shook up California in 1992, but only one person died. A less intense earthquake in Managua in 1972 left 15,000 victims.
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. Governments may not be able to prevent the material damage (homes, bridges, etc.) of natural disasters, but effective organization coordinated by governments and civil organizations can prevent unnecessary loss of human life. 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. 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. While there was sufficient warning from the weather service and civil defense about the possible consequences of Mitch, less than 80 miles from Managua entire villages were buried alive. More than 3,000 people were killed by Mitch in Nicaragua and at least 1,200 hurt. Fifty-two percent of the victims were children.[1]
Nature can provoke disasters and so can human-created political structures. 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. 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. The structural-adjustment programs imposed on poor nations by Washington and the international financial institutions create dependency and impoverishment. They rob people and their governments of the capacity to comply with the elementary responsibility to provide for the general welfare of their societies.
The 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. In the 1850s, the town of Granada was burnt to the ground by U.S. conqueror William Walker, who had proclaimed himself president of Nicaragua, because it attempted to resist his imperial plans. Walker left behind a sign saying, “This was Granada.” Granada came back, but Posoltega will not.
Indeed, Posoltega may well be the Pompeii of the twentieth century—a symbol of the fate of the nations of the South. What will future archeologists discover there? Men, women and children, all poor, buried alive, clutching each other. They had few possessions, barely scratching a living out of a landscape that is no longer recognizable. 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.
The people of Posoltega died primarily because they were poor and mostly destitute. Had they not been, then they would not have been living on the eroded hillsides that washed away with the heavy rains; they would have migrated. 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. People took to settling on the slopes of volcanoes, often ill-advised by irresponsible land-distribution policies.
To make matters worse, as in most of Nicaragua, the people of Posoltega took the ax to the remaining forests for firewood—they could not afford gas or kerosene stoves—leaving the mountain slope like a sled, ever so ready to quicken instead of holding back earth displacements provoked by rains. Primitive slash-and-burn techniques and uncontrollable fires in the summer of 1997 took a huge toll on the forests. Just last year, government authorities reported that there were some 18,000 forest fires over the course of the dry season. Deprived of thick vegetation, mountain slopes no longer hold back water but instead simply produce mud and mudslides, inundating plains, valleys and lower zones. When there is flooding, rivers overflow and create new tributaries overnight, sweeping away everything in their wake. Poverty and dislocation contributed to the environmental devastation that turns unusual weather patterns like Mitch into catastrophes.
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. 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. Little did the campesinos of Posoltega know that when they tilled the soil they were also digging their own graves.[2]
Something is dreadfully wrong when a rain precipitation of less than 40 inches can create such havoc. It is not “El Niño” or global climate change. The scope of the devastation can be explained principally in socio-ecological 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.
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.[3] The result is an internal commercial system that allows big merchants inappropriate profits that in reality belong to the campesino producer. Liberalization means that most basic foodstuffs can be freely imported, thereby undermining small farmers, while the industrial countries insist on protecting their own farmers. Even the Nicaraguan government goes out of its way to subsidize sugar production on the big commercial estates.
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). 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 Alemán governments. Land is being handed back to Somoza-era land barons, particularly those who acquired U.S. citizenship and can count on U.S. government backing and blackmail tactics.[4] Under these disadvantaged conditions, Nicaragua and similarly impoverished countries might as well live in a permanent state of emergency every time the rain appears to be excessive.
This was a disaster foretold. 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. Posoltega was buried four days after the heavy rain reached critical dimensions. Still, President Arnoldo Alemán resisted the recommendations of many, including several ministers, to declare a state of national emergency and proceed with mass evacuation and rescue efforts. No, he said, such a mobilization would be something that the Sandinistas would do—and he was certainly no Sandinista. But one need not be a Sandinista to know that many UN relief operations would not kick in without such a legal declaration. Who was going to take the Nicaraguan plight seriously if the country’s own president did not?
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. Alemán played meteorologist in front of television cameras, assuring everyone that the little drizzle would soon pass. This was three days after Mitch assumed hurricane dimensions and some European aid agencies began pulling their people out of risky areas. Even the Weather Channel was issuing serious warnings about what Alemán termed a “little excess rain.” The heaviest rainfall took place on October 27. The next day the army reported that 30,000 were already displaced. Still the order for the state of alert was not issued. In the following days, communities were flooded and bridges were washing away, yet still no state of alert. 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? 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. 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.
The fault does not lie exclusively with Alemán. 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. 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. 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.
As a New York Times reporter remarked, “Some countries work, some don’t. This one doesn’t.” There is some exaggeration in such a statement, but not much. 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. 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. The army—that legacy of the Sandinista revolution still hated by many right-wingers—never looked so good. The police—the only representative of the state in many communities—did a heroic job. 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.
Why was the police budget cut? Why was the civil defense budget request rejected? President Alemán 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. And why try so hard to comply with the IMF’s Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF) and even exceed some of its requirements? The answer, the President said, was the debt-reduction plan of the multilateral banks for the most heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC). Winning early entry into the HIPC plan would enable Alemán to use debt “relief” as a political trump card in the next election on behalf of his chosen successor. Small wonder that several international agencies had misgivings about turning over relief aid and responsibilities for aid distribution to government entities.
Donors have long harbored serious doubts about the cronyism and corruption that characterizes the central government in Nicaragua. 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. 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. [See “Strange Bedfellows: The Alemán-Ortega Pact,” by Alejandro Bendaña, in this issue].
In part, the Alemán 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. 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. 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. 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. After the hurricane, plans are underway in both Nicaragua and Honduras to accelerate the pace and broaden the scope of privatization.
While government officials and business tycoons speak wonders of the benefits of debt cancellation, structural-adjustment programs that inhibit development are in fact an integral part of the HIPC scheme. Indeed, in the weeks after Mitch, the president of the Nicaraguan Central Bank said that the ESAF program could not be touched and that the purpose of debt cancellation was to better allow the government to comply with its terms. During his visit to Managua just after the storm in November 1998, IMF director Michel Camdessus insisted on the same. 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.”[6]
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. 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. 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. It was an opportunity lost.
The costs associated with Mitch are staggering. Estimates of long-term damage are still preliminary, but the costs will surely be monumental and long-lasting. Honduras may require new homes for an estimated 1.4 million people, about 25% of the population. Nicaragua needs about a million homes for about 20% of the population. In addition, there are catastrophic losses of crops that are the backbone of the economy. 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.[7]
Highly publicized media images of the catastrophe jarred people and governments around the world. One wonders what would have happened without the photographers and television crews. Bangladesh suffered huge floods the year prior to Mitch but there was hardly a blip on international television screens. 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? And why only by this sort of horror, a dramatic, photogenic natural disaster (or rarely, famine)?”[8]
The truth was and is that a majority of Nicaraguans were already below the poverty line. 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. According to a recent World Food Program and UNICEF report, 24% of Nicaraguan children under six suffer from physical maldevelopment due to chronic malnutrition.[9] A World Bank study based on the 1995 census found that 82.3% of the population lived in conditions of generalized poverty. Illiteracy in rural areas is up to 42.8%—a two-fold increase over 1985 levels. Poverty and joblessness have forced 40% of the economically active population to seek work outside the country.[10] 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. 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.
Would an ounce of prevention have saved pounds of relief? Prevention—that is, structurally addressing the man-made dimensions of disasters—would certainly be more expensive than relief. 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.
Take the United States. 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). President Reagan sent nuclear aircraft carriers and battle ships, while Congress approved some $100 million for the Contras to wage war.
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. According to the UN, 80% of Nicaragua’s municipalities are not prepared to meet new natural disasters. 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.
If one human being takes the life of another, such an offense is punishable by law. But what about neoliberal economics, debt dependence and structural adjustment? True prevention begins with information and organization, but it does not end there: It also requires funding. As the bankers say, “Who pays?” This is the UN-declared International Decade for the Reduction of Natural Disasters. 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?
We know that our countries and communities suffer in the form of historical transfer of resources from South to North. And we ask: Where is justice, where is restitution, where is the structural transformation that we all need? These are questions we must answer. We cannot control Nature. Yet we can control governments and government-dominated multilateral bodies.
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. 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. They challenge the details and sometimes the manifestation of savage capitalism, but not the essence and structural roots of this economic savagery. They propose monitoring corporations, the governments, the multilateral bodies. 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. How else can we stanch the systemic globalized mudslide that is burying the poor the world over?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alejandro Bendaña is founder and president of the Center for International Studies based in Managua. He was the Ambassador to the UN and Secretary General of the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry under the Sandinista Government in 1981-82 and 1984-1990 respectively. He is author of several books, including La mística de Sandino (Centro de Estudios Internacionales, 1994) and Power Lines: U.S. Dominance in the New Global Order (Interlink Press, 1996). He authored the November/December 1978 issue of NACLA Report on the Americas, “Crisis in Nicaragua.”
NOTES
1. “Pobreza Reina en la Región Atlántica,” La Prensa (Managua), May 23, 1999.
2. Interview with Jaime Incer in La Prensa (Managua), November 9, 1998.
3. “Recovery for Nicaragua and Honduras,” Oxfam International Briefing Paper, November 16, 1998.
4. “El Fondo Monetario, Ecológico y Social del Desastre,” El Nuevo Diario (Managua), November 10, 1999.
5. “Mitch: Huracán Político del Presidente,” Confidencial (Managua), November 8-14, 1998.
6. European Network on Debt and Development (EURODAD), “Central America Update: Welcome to the New Honduras and Nicaragua,” November 1998. Available on-line at .
7. “Destrucción en el Campo Aumentará el Desempleo,” La Prensa (Managua), November 12, 1998.
8. The Economist, November 14, 1998.
9. “Desnutrición es Amenaza Nacional,” El Nuevo Diario (Managua), June 2, 1999.
10. Envío (Managua), June 1999.
