The answer is essentially political. Hurricane Mitch is one of the many hurricanes that meander in the Caribbean this time of year. It wasn’t even the strongest; indeed it was categorized as a tropical storm when it reached land. Yet it hits the poorest part of Central America leaving thousands dead and inflicting devastating damage. More furious weather phenomena hit Florida or Cuba, but the human toll is minimal. Floods in Honduras or Bangladesh takes a huge toll. An earthquake measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale shook up California in 1992 and one person died. A less intense earthquake in Managua in 1973 left 15,000 victims. A typhoon in Bangladesh can signify half a million lives.

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

   Nature can provoke disasters and so can human-created political structures. The difference is that the first is a calamity and the second is simply criminal. Criminality is implicit in the absence of preventive organizations and alert communications as government and civil society took to the task of preserving lives and property.

    Limited institutional ability can be directly linked to poverty and incompetent government, but it should not be divorced from dependency and insertion in international structures that spell impoverishment and rob people of their very right to life by depriving them, or their governmental structures, of the capacity to comply with the elementary responsibility to ensure the safety of its citizens, indeed the right to life. 

Las Casitas

    The town of Las Casitas in the municipality of Posoltega lays buried under the mud. The US conqueror William Walker last century proclaimed himself President, burnt down the city of Granada leaving a sign behind saying, “This was Granada”. Granada came back, but Las Casitas will not. It may well be the Pompeii of the 20th century. What will future archeologists discover there? Men, women and children who died holding on to each other, buried alive, all poor, with very little possessions, barely scratching a living of a landscape that is no longer recognizable. Yet far less sumptuous than Pompeii because no wealthy lived in Las Casitas, there were no palaces, just humble housing, often made of adobe – mud – that simply disintegrates when it comes into contact with water. 

   The people of Las Casitas died primarily because they were poor and mostly destitute. Were they not, then they would not have been living there, they would have migrated. Those in nearby agricultural settlements also died, forced to migrate on account of poverty and unfair land distribution, on account of an export-oriented economy that substituted cotton for orchards and forest, leaving the countryside barren, once the prices of cotton collapsed on the international market never to rise again. So people took to settling on the slopes of volcanoes, ill advised by irresponsible externally-funded agrarian projects, and worse still, cut timber for firewood (they could not afford gas or kerosene) leaving the mountain slope like a sled ever so ready to quicken instead of holding back earth displacements provoked by rains. 

    This was a disaster foretold worthy of Garcia Marquez – Crónica de Una Muerte Anunciada (unofficial translation: Story of an Announced Death). The central government basically ignored the weather service and civil defense reports, it played down the first information stating this was a focalized phenomenon with no serious national implications. Las Casitas was buried four days after the heavy rain reached critical dimensions. 

   Still President Aleman resisted the recommendations of many, including several ministers, to declare a state of national emergency and proceed with mass evacuation, displacement and rescue efforts. No, he said, that is something the Sandinistas would do, and he was no Sandinista. But you did not have to be a Sandinista to know that many of the United Nations System 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 the President of Honduras declared an emergency and took to the media and international organizations to demand immediate attention and support, his Nicaraguan colleague just across the border played it all down. Aleman 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 cooperation agencies began pulling their people out of the risky areas. Even the “Weather Channel” was issuing serious warnings about what Aleman termed  a “little excess rain”. Only on October 30, four days after the deluge began, was the National Emergency Committee set up and given the go- ahead to national emergency planning.

    Still, in the best of cases, let us assume greater sensitivity, efficiency and responsibility on the part of the government – a big assumption indeed – would it have been much different? We simply don’t know, but one thing is for sure, with proper backing more people would have been battling to prevent the worse and today we would still be able to lift our heads with some pride and say we did our best. Instead we have to say that little was done properly, before during and after the disaster.

    The fault does not lie exclusively with Aleman. Nicaragua is a country that was ruined by war and then ruined again with excess debt payment and structural adjustment policies that drastically reduces the capacity of government to govern. Elementary basis of State presence – such as civil defense structures, police, fire brigades and clinics, not to mention minimally empowered municipal bodies – 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. In Nicaragua 54 of the 143 municipalities are classified as highly vulnerable to flooding, but due to budget cuts only 37 of those 54 had an active civil defense set up.  

    Had it not been for people helping people through their own civic structures, everyone seemed to be running around either throwing their hands up or posing for cameras. As The New York Times reporter remarked, “Some countries work, some don’t. This one doesn’t”.

    The truth is that Nicaragua was working, but it was working for and within the neoliberal framework of irresponsible dismantlement of state institutional capacities, misguided spending limitations affecting civil defense and prevention structures. Cheap roads and cheap bridges fell apart quickly, so when hundreds were cut off and many 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 police, which in many communities represents the only state presence, did a heroic job, and they could have done much more had their budget not 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 Aleman was uncharacteristically honest in saying that his government was determined to comply at any cost with the Structural Adjustment Plan (ESAF), building up the reserves mandated by the IMF, and slashing budgets on “non-essential” services.

Relief v. Rehabilitation

    The costs associated with Mitch are staggering. Estimates of long-term damage are still preliminary – no one can agree on figures in both Honduras and Nicaragua – but what is sure is that the costs will be monumental and long term. Honduras may require new homes for an estimated 1.4 million people for about 25% of the population. Nicaragua needs about 1 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 government’s response: creation of ten thousand temporary jobs with a weekly salary of US$9.

   Highly-publicized media images of the catastrophe jarred people and governments. One wonders what would have happened without the photographers and television crews. Bangladesh suffered huge floods but there was a hardly a blip on television screens. The conservative 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?”

    The truth was and is that a majority of Nicaraguans were already below the poverty line, like many in the so-called poor countries, barely surviving from day to day, victims of the structural and permanent hurricane that takes the form of joblessness, extreme poverty, absence of health care, malnutrition producing, over time, more deaths (off camera) than the toll taken by a single flood.

    So what of the generosity? Could an ounce of prevention have saved pounds of “relief”? What stands out here is that prevention – that is structurally addressing the man-made dimensions of disasters – would be much more expensive than relief. Emergency assistance is much more congenial and “safe” than addressing the structural dimensions of the dimensions of national enfeeblement in the so-called Third World.

    Take the United States. It responded by sending some 8 helicopters and about $70 million in supplies. During the 1980s, the US spent $15 billion in waging war in Central America (half to destroy and enfeeble Nicaragua). Instead of 8 helicopters, Mr. Reagan then sent full-scale nuclear aircraft carriers and battle ships, while Congress approved some $100 million for the contras to wage war.

Environmental degradation and Poverty

   In terms of floods and landslides, just as important is a strong environmental and forestry protection program that could contain the savage deforestation suffered in Nicaragua’s mountainous areas. Primitive slash-and-burn techniques and uncontrollable fires last summer took a huge toll on the forests. Satellite observation revealed that some 18,000 forest fires took place in Nicaragua over the course of the dry season – a figure that is greater than all the forest fires in all of Central America over the past eight years. Deprived of thick vegetation, mountain slopes no longer held back water but instead simply produced mud and mud slides, inundating plains, valleys and lower zones, sweeping everything in its wake. 

   For over 20 years, however, the warning of geographers and ecologists have been ignored by populations and governments that warned of the consequences of placing settlements in volcanic soils that, although rich, are also very susceptible to erosion and shifts. What this means is that what happened in Las Casitas this year can take place next year or later in at least a dozen other mountain settlements. Little did campesinos know that when they tilled the soil they were also digging their own grave.

    Something is dreadfully wrong when a rainfall of under 1,000 millimeters can create such havoc. And it is not “El Niño” or global climate change. The scope of the devastation is explained principally in socio-ecological terms: the impact of impoverishment and the agro-ecological destruction that it helps generate led to a situation where such rainfall results in up to 2,500 dead, 1 million homeless and 40% of the agrarian production in tatters.

Debt Cancellation for Whom and How?

    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, in the form of mounting interest rates on the foreign debt, in the form of a highly regressive taxation system.

   The government deliberately played down the tragedy because it did not want to scare international investors, or give the Bretton Woods institutions the impression that the country might fall into arrears. We know that neoliberal economics and politics kills through structural violence in the form of high infant mortality rates, malnourishment, denied rights to health and education, etc. Perhaps, however, we were never so aware of how macroeconomics mania 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 has meant that public agencies had to cut expenditures between 30-90% in real terms since 1994. After the hurricane, plans are underway in both countries to accelerate the pace and broaden the scope of privatization. Under these conditions, Nicaragua and other countries might as well live in a permanent state of emergency every time the rain appears to be excessive.

    We know that countries and human beings are bled and that they pay in the form of historical transfer of resources from South to North. We cannot control nature but we can control governments and government-dominated multilateral bodies. 

   Of course there are always those, beginning with the neoliberals themselves, that claim that capital and markets, like the Lord, works in mysterious ways and that this cannot be contested. Horse manure. But we also hear some voices that say we must be “pragmatic” and deal with those “realities” of power. Help the poor because we cannot contest poverty? They say let us monitor the corporations, the governments, the multilateral bodies; we say let us transform them and, if need be, dismantle them and create people-centered as opposed to US/corporate/capital-oriented instruments of power. 

   What then about the systemic globalized mudslide that is burying the poor the world over?

    Or if we look at it in systemic terms we could calculate that total aid to Nicaragua is the equivalent of what we pay in 20 days in servicing our foreign debt. So far the US administration has been deaf to the pleas for debt relief or cancellation made by Jimmy Carter and the Central American presidents. Washington has pledged a total of $80 million for the region – precisely the same amount that Nicaragua and Honduras would have to pay back in five weeks. 
They say that imitation is the highest form of flattery. But when Nicaragua Jubilee, a coalition of religious and lay groups, squarely put the issue of debt cancellation on the public agenda, government officials and even some of our debt monitoring friends laughed us off. Look who’s laughing now when everybody from President Aleman, Cardinal Obando, Jimmy Carter and even George Bush starting talking of writing off or adjusting debt payments.

   So now the question is not whether there should be debt cancellation but how. Government officials and business tycoons speak of cancellation by adjusting the Structural Adjustment straitjacket and the HIPC (Highly Indebted Poor Countries) framework. The President of the Nicaraguan Central Bank stated that the ESAF program could not be touched and that the purpose of debt cancellation was to better allow the government to comply with ESAF. While in Managua, Michel Camdessus, Director of the IMF, agreed. 

    But it is clear that structural adjustment programs, an integral part of the HIPC scheme, will continue to concentrate on macroeconomic stability at the expense of substantive poverty alleviation program possibilities.

   The Nicaragua Jubilee Initiative, calling for a new beginning for people and land, believes that debt cancellation, if it is to lead to social alleviation, must deal with processes of indebtment and impoverishment, and therefore entails an alternative to both SAPs and HIPC, and the neoliberal premises on which they are based. SAPs, ESAF and HIPC – or even debt cancellation itself – will draw us away from the chief need and objective of poverty alleviation and social development. Debt cancellation, in this context, does not spell structural reform but rather sustained liberalization, privatization schemes, macro-economic neoliberal programs linked to generating maximum foreign exchange earnings for debt servicing to be resumed with little regard for community micro-economics.

    For this reason Nicaragua Jubilee calls for debt cancellation with explicit links to the creation of a Reconstruction and Human Development Fund drawn from international donations and governmental redirecting in national counterpart funds derived from debt servicing. Unless we deal with the disaster that takes the form of neoliberal political and development model, including its ecological and social components, Nicaragua and other countries will remain “accidents” waiting to happen.


Alejandro Bendaña is a former UN Ambassador and Secretary General under the Sandinista government. He is presently President of the Centro de Estudios Internacionales, an advocacy and popular education institute, in Managua, Nicaragua. Fax: 505-2-670517. 
Email: cei@nicarao.org.ni