Murderous Mitch

By Tim Padgett/Managua

Tragedy is numbingly routine in Central America. Poverty, earthquakes and civil wars have savaged the region for most of this century. Still, the Dantesque calamity that hit the isthmus last week may have taken suffering to a new plateau. As many as 10,000 people were estimated dead in the battered countries of Nicaragua and Honduras, while some 2 million were left homeless, in the wake of the relentless rains of Hurricane Mitch. In all, the storm caused a staggering $3 billion in damage--more than half the combined Nicaraguan and Honduran gross domestic products.

In Nicaragua alone, where 3,800 were thought dead, much of the landscape looks as barren as the moon. Starving, sallow-skinned children, many suffering cholera from the fetid waters that destroyed their homes, begged for food on the crumbled, mud-slick roads between Managua and the flooded northern sierras.

For towns like the once thriving community of Posoltega, nestled on rich soil beneath the Casitas Volcano in Nicaragua's mountainous northwest, Mitch was the apocalypse. Close to noon on Oct. 30, after the hurricane had dumped three days of rain into Casitas's crater, the mountainside burst with what villagers described as the angry roar of a jetliner. It hurled mud, water and rock onto Posoltega's rooftops, "a terrible, towering wall that just fell out of the clouds," says Santo Diaz, 24. Diaz gathered his elderly father, mother, sister and two brothers to escape--but the avalanche claimed them. He was still clutching their hands as they were buried alive.

In Honduras, Mitch spawned the worst floods in 200 years. The waters may have killed more than 5,000 people and left 11,000 missing. As Vice President William Handel helicoptered over the deluged Ulua River valley, he saw three people trapped on a patch of high ground, waving frantically. The waters rose so fast that the chopper couldn't land--and Handel, just yards away, watched them drown, tossed like rag dolls in the current.

As the gravity of the disaster reached around the world, close to $100 million in aid poured in. But Central America's development, which lagged far behind the rest of the world before the hurricane, has been set back decades.

Many if not most of Mitch's victims were youngsters--including not only those who drowned but also those whose malnourished bodies were no match for the deadly septic infections set free in the waters. Says Charles Compton, local head of Plan International relief organization: "We have to keep starvation and infection from claiming as many victims as the hurricane did." When the final tally is in, the assertions of a staggering toll may well be borne out. Those whom the floodwaters did not kill face the problems of isolation, starvation, disease and neglect--the normal stuff of tragedy in Central America, made hundreds of times worse by Mitch's murderous rains.

--With reporting by Lorraine Orlandi/Posoltega, Fiona Ortiz/San Pedro Sula and Melanie Wetzel/Tegucigalpa

With reporting by Lorraine Orlandi/Posoltega, Fiona Ortiz/San Pedro Sula and Melanie Wetzel/Tegucigalpa