Fulvio Cajina

On April 8, 1999, Carlos F. Chamorro, Visiting Professor at the School of Journalism and former editor of La Barricada in Nicaragua, gave a talk entitled "Hurricane Mitch: The Politics of Reconstruction in Central America" at the Center for Latin American Studies.

The talk dealt with the reconstruction efforts currently taking place in Central America--mostly in Nicaragua and Honduras--after last year's devastating Hurricane Mitch left thousands dead and many more missing, destroyed millions of dollars in crops, and erased fifty years of infrastructure investments. In the Nicaraguan city of Posoltega alone, at least 2,000 people died as a result of mud slides that swept down the face of the Las Casitas volcano.

In the face of the human suffering wrought by Mitch, Chamorro stated that governmental responses have been uneven. Chamorro reported that, five months after the hurricane, one saw "heavy machinery repairing roads" before the commencement of the rainy season, while at the same time, many of the survivors were still living in tents awaiting the reconstruction of the city. In his analysis of the aftermath of the storm, Chamorro pointed to several problems which have led to the unbalanced and slow reconstruction effort.

Among these problems are: a lack of local level participation in the recovery, private and national interests competing for a share of the international aid, and possible corruption.

In Nicaragua, as roads are frantically being fixed, many survivors have seen very little of the flood of foreign aid that has been directed to the afflicted region. The problem is even worse in remote areas where hardly any aid has reached the affected people. The government's response as to why very little government aid had reached Posoltega, for example, was that the local Sandinista mayor, from the opposing presidential party, had not tried to coordinate with the Executive in the distribution of aid.

In Honduras, the government of President Carlos Flores has taken a more top-down approach in allocating foreign aid. Chamorro reported that Honduras has reorganized its Cabinet and the president is now running the effort in a "centralized, authoritarian process." Chamorro indicated that it is not clear this reorganization produced substantial improvements in efficiency.

In Nicaragua, the opposite organizational trend is evident. Seeking to move the center of recovery efforts away from government agencies, 320 non-governmental organizations have joined together to form "La Coordinadora Civil de Organizaciones No Gubernamentales," and have subsequently issued pleas for international funds that could go directly to local governments. However, the importance of these new actors is hard to measure since their organizational efforts are still in an embryonic stage.

In Honduras, by contrast, no such efforts to organize or coordinate the actions of non-governmental entities has been observed.

Even early on in the tragedy, when the Catholic Church had been one of the main NGOs involved in the relief efforts in both countries, the character of its involvement had a different flavor in each country. In Honduras, the church mainly assisted with efforts at the grass-roots level. On the other hand, in Nicaragua, according to Chamorro, it mostly served to legitimize the efforts of the Aleman government.

Another human-induced problem that Mr. Chamorro addressed in relation to Hurricane Mitch was the competition that is taking place for foreign aid in Central America- what Chamorro termed an "opportunistic approach" to tragedy. For instance, he pointed out that less affected Central American countries would most likely lobby hard for more international aid for regional projects in the upcoming summit in Stockholm in May, while Nicaragua and Honduras would have to focus, owing to the continuing gravity of the situation, on their near-term needs. Moreover, he said that organizations, like the Inter-American Development Bank, seem also to have a more long-term perspective for reconstruction, even though hundreds of thousands of people are still homeless in these countries.

Aside from the machinations taking place on a national level, there is a fierce competition developing among private interests for the aid. In many of these countries, it is the construction companies that are most audibly voicing their interest in big reconstruction contracts. And their voices have, apparently, not gone unheard. Fifty to sixty percent of all recovery projects involve the reconstruction of roads and the electrical infrastructure. The evident investment bias toward major infrastructure projects in a context of contaminated drinking water and destroyed housing leads many to assume that the governments are not properly channeling the scarce monetary resources.

The accusations of corruption also stem from the lack of government transparency in awarding certain companies big construction projects, and from the private gains some politicians appear to have managed as a result of Mitch. In Nicaragua, President Aleman, a coffee grower by trade, has privately bought out many bankrupt and defunct state run cooperative farms in the wake of Mitch- at extremely low prices. Such actions are undermining the recovery process and the credibility of the governments nationally and internationally, affecting the possibility for future aid and debt renegotiation. Already, international attention is beginning to drift away from the region. Although President Clinton recently visited the area, for example, Central America was not extended an invitation into NAFTA, and a $956 million aid promise has been sidelined in Congress, pending approval.

Thus, the lack of local level relief coordination, the opportunistic approach to competing for relief aid, and governmental corruption are setting the stage for another kind of disaster. Chamorro predicted that the burden of such a second disaster would likely fall on the shoulders of the same people who were affected most by the first. The peasantry, first stranded in a sea of mud, now find themselves buried in a sea of broken promises and political games.