The hurricane that devastated Central America killed thousands and slaughtered the hopes of millions

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.

One of the most ghoulish aspects of the havoc was its stealthy approach. Even as Mitch was blasting volcanoes, it was dismissed as an anticlimactic hurricane. When it formed over the Caribbean a week earlier, it was a Category 5 vortex whose winds whipped the sea at 290 km/h. Mitch was deemed likely to strike the gilded resort area of Cancun on Mexico's Yucatan coast. But then the storm weakened, stopped near the Nicaragua-Honduras border and stayed there until Nov. 1. Afterward it moved out to the Gulf of Mexico as a mundane tropical storm.

For almost five days, the "resting" Mitch dumped nearly half a meter of pounding rain a day on some of the region's most vulnerable landscape. In Honduras, it overwhelmed two large rivers, the Ulua and Chamelecon, near the country's second largest city, San Pedro Sula. That turned San Pedro and the Ulua Valley into a churning, 200-sq-km lake and ruined most of the nation's crucial banana crop. Tarpaulin-tent cities set up on supposedly safe high ground were swept away within two days. Those who tried their luck on rooftops were soon devoured by monstrous brown floods. When the rampage spread to the Choluteca River, which runs through the capital of Tegucigalpa, much of Honduras was submerged. Outside Tegucigalpa office buildings, the floods rose two stories high.

IN NICARAGUA, THE HEAVIEST RAIN FELL SQUARELY on the northern mountain ranges. That added terrifying velocity to floods as they lacerated the valleys and plains below, cutting deep ravines as wide as football fields. As they destroyed lives, the crashing waters ruined more than a third of the country's major cash crops. Refugees from Guanacastal, a hamlet near Posoltega, huddled dazed and injured around a campfire near the Panamerican Highway, where they told of villagers killed when a wall of water crashed into their streets and swept away even the well-built cement-block houses. As of late last week, they said, floodwaters at home were still above their heads, and corpses of villagers, cows and pigs were fueling a cholera epidemic. "Our lives are gone," said a teary Francisca Mendoza, 34, clutching powdered-milk boxes for her six small children.

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 flooding waters. (In Nicaragua, 66% of the children were malnourished before the rains began.) "It's hard for anyone to appreciate how utterly cut off these people are right now," says Charles Compton, local head of the London based Plan International relief organization. "We have to keep starvation and infection from claiming as many victims as the hurricane did."

"No one knows how many are dead," U.S. Ambassador to Honduras James F. Creagan said bluntly. But when the final tally is in, the assertions of a staggering toll may well be borne out. Those whom the floodwaters did not kill are still threatened by isolation, starvation, disease and neglect--the normal stuff of tragedy in Central America, made hundreds of times worse by Mitch's murderous rains.

Questions

1. What immediate impact did Hurricane Mitch have on Central America? What longterm effect is the storm likely to have on the region?

2. Why was the approach of Hurricane Mitch "ghoulish"?

Answers

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