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| THE ROAD TO RECOVERY | |
 November 30, 1998 
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| Over 6,000 dead. | ||||||||||||||
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U.S. AMBASSADOR JAMES CREAGAN: The roads are critical. That's the immediate reconstruction need, and we will be helping to do that. Temporary bridges, fords through streams, that are good until the rainy season next June, and working on the roads themselves. It's amazing that -- you may have seen the North Coast - but there are areas where 30 or 40 kilometers of road have simply disappeared. CHARLES KRAUSE: Finance Minister Gabriella Nunez says Honduras has
been set back 25 years. |
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CHARLES KRAUSE: Beyond the highways, the bridges and the infrastructure that's been destroyed, fully one-fifth of the Honduran population -- nearly a million four hundred thousand people -- remain homeless. Many of them are still stranded, dependent on helicopters -- and the mercy of international relief agencies --- for their food and water. Others live in makeshift tents along highways near their homes, which are still too damp and caked with mud to reinhabit. CHARLES KRAUSE: Maria Lopez Moreno told us that relief supplies are being delivered on a regular basis. But food comes in only every other day, and here on the outskirts of La Lima, Honduras, the homeless are forced to use what little money they have to buy drinking water. Elsewhere, the homeless live in schools that've been converted into temporary shelters. Cramped and primitive, the schools feel like refugee camps, and Honduras feels like a country that's lost a war. |
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| Rebuilding
over 200,000 homes. |
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It's estimated that Honduras will need to rebuild upwards of 200,000 houses, and that much of the money will have to come from international lending institutions like the Inter-American Development in Washington. Over the past month, Enrique Iglesias, the bank's president, has been meeting on an emergency basis with Nunez and the other Central American finance ministers trying to assess their immediate needs and then what it will take to rebuild. Iglesias says he's never seen a natural disaster more destructive than Hurricane Mitch.
JIM LEHRER: The tragedy in the Central American nation of Honduras and to - CHARLES KRAUSE: Flores has also used the media effectively to appeal
for international sympathy and support. During the first days after
the hurricane, there was widespread fear that businessmen would take
advantage of food shortages to drive up prices. But the government responded
quickly. And now, there's general agreement that Flores has been more
effective than many expected handling this first phase of the crisis. |
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CHARLES KRAUSE: Still, there's a general consensus that the most difficult
time for Honduras is yet to come. Like someone involved in a very serious
automobile accident, the emergency rescue teams have arrived and Honduras
has been stabilized. But the internal injuries are so great and the
twin opportunistic infections of incompetence and corruption are so
prevalent in situations like this one -- especially in Central America
-- that rebuilding the country may prove even more |
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| Destruction of the banana crop. | ||||||||||||||
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CHARLES KRAUSE: Although most of the Sula Valley is used for agriculture, there's an increasingly important number of maquila plants that manufacture mostly clothes for export to the United States. At the Continental industrial park, ten of the plants were flooded, and their workers are now increasingly desperate -- picking through mounds of discarded clothing trying to find anything at all that's salvageable. We asked them about an incident the day before, when several hundred workers had reportedly forced their way into the industrial park itself looking for scraps of cloth they might dry out and use for clothing.
CHARLES KRAUSE: Do you sense that people here are beginning to get frustrated?
CHARLES KRAUSE: The danger of delaying reconstruction programs, especially for the poor and the homeless, is apparent -- even to those far removed from the shelters and the neighborhoods that were heavily damaged or swept away. Banker Guillermo Bueso is an influential member of the Honduran establishment who says the reconstruction effort must begin quickly. GUILLERMO BUESO: Why? Because you may have people so distressed, so abandoned that we may have social frictions. CHARLES KRAUSE: Bueso estimates that the total damage caused by Mitch is close to $4 billion. And even though he's a firm believer in privatization and shrinking government control over the economy, he's concluded that only a massive public works program can forestall social unrest and revive economic activity in the short run.
CHARLES KRAUSE: But even as the government rushes to develop an official assessment of the damage and a reconstruction plan, there's a growing feeling both in Honduras and in Washington that as tragic as Mitch was, it also offers a long-overdue opportunity for change. Luis Consenza Jiminez heads FIDE, a Honduran foundation which promotes private enterprise. |
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| An opportunity for change? | ||||||||||||||
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CHARLES KRAUSE: Cosenza and others say that one of the most critical choices Honduras will have to make concerns deforestation, which contributed directly to the flooding and the high number of people and property lost during Hurricane Mitch. Grinding rural poverty and an extremely high birth rate have driven an increasing number of campesino families into Honduran cities like Tegucigalpa -- where the poor cut down trees to build shacks on desolate mountainsides or along unprotected riverbanks.
CHARLES KRAUSE: One answer to the problem might be land reform, traditionally a very politically charged issue in Latin America. At the Inter-American Development Bank, Enrique Iglesias says there are also a host of other issues and opportunities that must be addressed.
CHARLES KRAUSE: The task ahead would be overwhelming even for a developed country with far more economic and human resources than Honduras -- one reason the United States and many other countries have sent so much emergency aid since the hurricane struck. But the future, rebuilding Honduras, remains uncertain. What can be said is that the country, damaged beyond recognition and despite many handicaps, is in critical condition but it's fighting for its life. And so far, it's surviving. |
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CHARLES
KRAUSE: Hurricane Mitch was a storm of biblical proportions, the most
destructive natural disaster in Central America's modern history. For
five days and five nights, there were torrential rains, flooding, and
mudslides. And by the time it was over, Hurricane Mitch had caused extensive
damage in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador. But it was Honduras
-- already the poorest country in Central America, and one of the poorest
countries in the world that was hit hardest. Even now, some three weeks
later, forensic teams are still searching for bodies buried in the rubble.
The
death toll has climbed beyond 6,000, while an even greater number is
still missing. In Tegucigalpa, drinking water is scarce because the
capital's sewage and water systems were cut and badly damaged. It may
be years before they're rebuilt. Meanwhile, the Honduran economy is
virtually paralyzed because two-thirds of the country's bridges and
much of the highway system were wiped out and will have to be rebuilt.
U.S. Ambassador James Creagan.
GABRIELLA
NUNEZ, Honduran Finance Minister: I would say we lost the whole country,
not only the economy side, but the psychological situation with everybody
in this country. So I would say we have a lot of job, a lot of work
to do in the next maybe 15 to 20 years. 
ENRIQUE
IGLESIUS, President, Inter-American Development Bank: It affected and
destroyed the fiscal infrastructure and at the same time destroyed the
economic infrastructure -- the plantations of bananas, of coffee, of
agriculture in general, damages that will take four or five years to
really be revealed. So it is a catastrophe of major proportions in lives
and in economic infrastructure, which is even sadder because this region
has been for years subject to all kinds of problems. We have there dictatorships,
we had there wars, confrontations for many, many years. When they started
in the last 10 years to reveal their democracies, their economies, and
we were starting to look, the thing was coming in the right direction,
they had this catastrophe, particularly Honduras and Nicaragua. 
CHARLES
KRAUSE: Concern about the potential political impact of Hurricane Mitch
is based on Central America's history: the Somoza government's failure
to rebuild Nicaragua's capital, Managua, after the earthquake there
in 1972 led directly to the Sandinista revolution seven years later,
and in 1974, three months after the last major hurricane hit Honduras,
there was a military coup. So the country's current president, Carlos
Flores Facusse, is taking no chances. From the moment Mitch hit, he's
been directly involved in virtually every aspect of the relief effort---
visiting shelters for the homeless and meeting important visitors, like
International Monetary Fund director Michel Camdessus. 
JAMES
CREAGAN, U.S. Ambassador: We try to think about it in U.S. terms and
try to think about dead and homeless in US terms where you might have
20 to 40 million homeless, that kind of thing. It's really big and it
will be tough, but there's a dedication on the part of Hondurans and
I'll tell you, I have been impressed both by the Honduran public sector
and also by the Honduran people out there. 
difficult
than the initial relief effort. Nowhere is the task ahead more evident
than the Sula Valley, where U.S. fruit companies own vast banana plantations
and where 70 percent of the Honduran economy comes from. As we overflew
the valley, Jose Molina, vice president of the local Chamber of Commerce,
told us the business community is anxious for the world to know the
extent of the damage and what it will take to rebuild. 
JOSE
MOLINA: See all these bananas are starting now to turn yellow, so all
the crop is completely lost. You see that there's so much destruction
here, that there's so much water still in these areas, because the two
rivers converged, and the rivers, I believe, still go on into areas
where crops were being planted, or where they had cattle. 
CHARLES
KRAUSE: "We're all desperate," she told us. "We had to get in and they
wouldn't let us in, so we used force." We also encountered the same
anxiety among the homeless in Tegucigalpa, where former residents of
a neighborhood called Miramesi showed us where their homes had been
before they were wiped out -- literally overnight. Now, Miramesi's 250
families spend much of their time filling out government forms with
no indication of whether, where or when they'll be given land and some
assistance to rebuild. Michael Miller is an American who was in Tegucigalpa
working with street children before the hurricane. He's now working
with the homeless from Miramesi. 
MICHAEL
MILLER, U.S. volunteer: Definitely. On Sunday, we had to leave one of
our five shelters, and that brought up a lot of emotions in the people.
They had been stable in the shelters. They had established themselves
and organized themselves and to have to leave a shelter brought up a
lot of the feelings of homelessness and hopelessness. I think with each
passing week, the people are going to get more and more frustrated and
communities are going to start talking about land invasions very soon.
GUILLERMO
BUESO: You need the government to reverse what we were doing. We were
reducing the size and the scope of the action of the government, following
of course what is the Washington consensus, and we were doing quite
right. Now, priority for the government is to become again a big spender
in the public -- in the utilities, roads, electricity and so forth,
which are not privatized yet. My idea and my recommendation is let's
start a pickup by the beginning of the next year. 
LUIS
COSENZA JIMINEZ: I think we have two choices. One is to rebuild the
country as it was before the hurricane and the other one is to seize
upon this opportunity and transform it into a country which is more
equitable, in which we have greater opportunities--- everyone has greater
opportunities. We do need international support obviously. But by and
large, I think it's a task that falls upon our own shoulders. It's a
question of whether we will have the will and determination to carry
it through and seize upon this opportunity, as I said before, to make
a difference in this country. 
LUIS
COSENZA JIMINEZ: They end up living in areas that are very susceptible
to flooding and we run into the problems that we have over here, so
in a way, we have a double problem if you wish --deforestation on the
one side that increases the possibility or probability of mudslides
or large floods -- and on the other hand, we have -- because of our
development -- we have people moving into the cities and having to live
in areas which are really not suitable for living. So we have both effects
combined and, therefore, we run into the destruction that we recently
had. 
ENRIQUE
IGLESIAS: Let me give you some examples. They have a lot of infrastructure,
bridges, roads. Maybe they will have to study the new routes, or new
technology, so that if something happened in the future, they have learned
from the present crisis. In the case of housing where they had a tremendous
problem, maybe the techniques of housing construction will be different
in different places with different structures. And then the environmental
problem, everybody agrees that this disaster was widely, widely amplified
because of environmental problems, deforestation. So let us try to make
of this a major issue. The world has to help in these countries to do
that, because not only are we defending the economy here or the social
problems; we are defending the new democracies that took so much time,
so much people dead, so much sad history behind, to endanger it now.
So it's important for many, many ways. 
