A hurricane or natural disaster hits two equally populated territories with the same force. Why is it that the human damage can be so much higher in one settlement than in another? And why does it take more time to recover in one than in the other?

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 made land fall. 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. Flooding 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 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. Some weeks earlier a hurricane swept across Cuba: again the human toll was minimal. The answer more effective organization. Ten years ago Hurricane Joan crossed war ravaged Nicaragua from East to West. Then even the most isolated communities along the Atlantic coast had sufficient warning and support for evacuation. There was ample warning from the weather service and Civil Defense about the possible consequences of Mitch--yet less than eighty miles from Managua, entire villages and families were buried alive.

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. The criminality implicit in the absence of preventive organizations, alert communications went out and as government and civil society took to the task of preserving lives and property. Limited institutional ability can be directly linked 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 insure the safety of its citizens, indeed the right to life.

The town of Posoltega lays buried under the mud. It may well be the Pompeii of the twentieth century. What will the future archaeologist discover there? Men, women and children--no discrimination 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. The people of Posoltega died primarily because they were poor and mostly destitute. Had they not, then they would not have been living there, 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. And once the prices of cotton collapsed on the international market never to rise again. So people took to settling on the slopes of volcanoes, sometimes ill advised by irresponsible externally funded agrarian projects, and what was worse, as in most of Nicaragua, took the ax to the timber for firewood--they could not afford gas or kerosene kitchens--leaving the mountain slope like a sled ever so ready to quicken instead of holding back earth displacements provoked by rains. And we could tell a parallel story in regard to other parts of Nicaragua where swollen rivers took down houses and sometimes lives, of those that drowned trying to cross rivers, or even in Managua itself, of the thousands of poor who lived by the lake and were force to run for their lives.

This was a disaster foretold worthy of Garcia Marquez novel--Cronica de Una Muerte Anunciada. The central government basically ignored the weather service and civil defense reports, it played down the first information stating this was a focalized phenomena with no serious national implications. Posoltega 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.

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. Again we don't know for sure, although one could compare with Honduras official reaction. 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."

There is some exaggeration, but not much. 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 Army--that legacy to the Sandinista Revolution still hated by many right-wingers--never looked so good. The Police, which in many communities represents the only state presence, did a heroic job, and they could have done much more but when their budget request was cut by two thirds, leaving Nicaragua a per capital 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, building up the reserves mandated by the IMF, and slashing budgets on "non-essential" services. And why try so hard to comply with ESAF and even exceed banking requirements: the answer he said was HIPC: the prospect (illusion) of attaining early entry into HIPC and thus being able to use debt "relief" as a political trump card in the next election on behalf of his chosen successor. Small wonder that several international agencies had misgivings about turning over relief aid and distribution to government bodies.

Donors have long harbored serious doubts about the cronyism and corruption that characterizes the Nicaraguan central authorities. In effect, the first lots of relief had a way of finding themselves to Liberal party dominated structures while having strange difficulties reaching Sandinista municipal governments

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 that is that the costs will be monumental and multiyear whose scale, according to the Washington Post, "almost defies the imagination." Honduras may required new homes for an estimated 1.4 million people about 25 percent of the population. Nicaragua needs about a million homes or about 20 percent 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$ 9.00. 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 thaeks the form of joblessness, extreme poverty, absence of health care, malnutrition producing over time more deaths (off camera) that the toll taken by a single flood.

So what of the generosity? Emergency assistance began to pour in--even though President Aleman continues to state that there is enough food to go around. Does an ounce of prevention could have saved pounds of relief 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 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 a full scale nuclear aircraft carriers and battle ships, while Congress approved some 100 million for the contras to wage war.

Official rationale tended to be ideological. The government deliberately played down the tragedy because it did not want to scare international investors, or give the Bretton Woods institutions that the country might fall into arrears. We know that neoliberal economics and politics kills--that it takes the form of 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 (primordial reason for being of SAPs) has meant that public agencies had to cut expenditures between 30% and 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. Something is dreadfully wrong when a rain precipitation of under 1,000 millimeters can create such havoc. And it is not "El Nino" or global climate change. The scope of the devastation is explained principally socio-ecological terms: the impact of impoverishment and the agro-ecological destruction that it helps generate leading to a situation where such rainfall leaves behind up to 2,500 dead, 1 million homeless and 40 percent of the agrarian production in tatters.

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. An internal commercial system allows big merchants appropriate profits that in reality belong to the campesino producer. Liberalization means that most basic foodstuffs can be freely imported thereby affecting small farmer systems, while the industrial countries insist on protecting their own farmers, and even the Nicaraguan government goes out of its way to subsidize sugar production in the hands of the big commercial estates.

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. But where is justice, where is restitution, where is transformation--where is the Jubilee? That is the question we must answer. We cannot control Nature but we can control governments and government-dominated multilateral bodies.