From Drought to Floods, El Nino Bashes Mexicans

First came the searing drought that shriveled the cornfields near Diego Woolrich’s farm. Then came the hurricane that hurled sheets of rain across his coffee fields, uprooting and flooding plants.

“We’ve never had such a tough time as this year,” moaned the farmer, who runs a 500-acre plantation near the Pacific resort of Puerto Escondido.

From drought to deluge, Mexicans have been battered this year by severe weather that has caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage while claiming an estimated 400 lives.

Replacing the shattered homes, rotting crops and drowned livestock in the impoverished states of Guerrero and Oaxaca--the worst affected--could take months or even years, experts say. Meanwhile, the El Nino weather phenomenon threatens to cause still further havoc.

“It will take a few years to reach, if not the same level as before, an acceptable situation [in damaged areas]. That’s because of the backwardness in these states,” said Ismael Aguilar, an economist at the Technological Institute of Monterrey, an institution sometimes called the MIT of Mexico.

Most of the damage was done by Hurricane Pauline, which smashed into Acapulco and the Pacific coast last week.

Pauline was the third and most severe tropical storm to batter Mexico in a month. The government has not yet released damage estimates, but officials are hoping that with only minor damage to hotels, the important tourism industry will not be crippled.

The tempests came after a bone-dry summer in central and southern Mexico caused by El Nino, which is characterized by a warming in the eastern Pacific that causes sharp swings in climate. Some scientists think El Nino also may have contributed to the intensity of the hurricanes, although such storms are common in the Pacific.

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The dramatic shifts in weather have been especially harsh for the nation’s farmers. The drought caused about $500 million in losses of corn, beans and other crops, said Manuel Contijoch Escontria, director of the Trust Fund for Agricultural Development, a federal agency that insures farmers against crop loss.

Woolrich, who produces gourmet coffee beans, had begun to worry at summer’s end that the lack of rainfall could soon affect his bushes. He already had seen the corn shrivel on his neighbors’ farms.

Instead, his coffee bushes are now deluged, and some were ripped apart by the fierce gusts. The wind tore the roofs off his hacienda’s buildings and ruined nearby roads.

Usually, Woolrich hires 200 workers to help his 60 regular employees with the harvest. However, he said, “many farms will only be able to contract 40% of the workers they traditionally did. This will be a social and economic problem for the state of Oaxaca.”

Woolrich’s difficulties are shared by thousands of other farmers. The Mexican Coffee Producers’ Federation estimates that half the coffee crop will be lost in Oaxaca, which produces 14% of the national total. That means losses of about $80 million, officials say.

Hundreds of thousands of acres of corn, peanuts, limes, coconuts and beans also were harmed, officials say.

The agricultural damage probably is not severe enough to dent Mexico’s overall strong economic performance this year, economists say. But tens of thousands of small farmers who don’t have insurance or savings have lost their livelihood, at least for the next few months.

President Ernesto Zedillo announced Monday that the government will launch a jobs program to employ hurricane victims temporarily in cleanup operations. Government officials said Tuesday that about 3,000 people already had started work, but it was not clear how many more will get jobs.

Even greater than the agricultural toll could be the losses to Mexican tourism. About 150,000 people work in tourism-related jobs in Acapulco, which receives about 2.5 million visitors a year, according to the Tourism Ministry. Officials said they expect the damage to be limited. Acapulco’s glitzy hotel zone suffered little damage, and the storm hit in the low season.

But news reports showing soldiers digging corpses from the mud and providing food to thousands of homeless poor in shelters could discourage vacationers. To counteract such images, Mexico has launched a campaign in the United States promoting its Pacific resorts.

“Yes, there were deaths, and it was a disaster, but there are already images coming out that things are returning to normal, people are playing in the pools,” said Hector Gandini, a spokesman for the Tourism Ministry.

The toll from this year’s severe weather also includes the collapse of about 11,000 homes, damage to about 75,000 more and destruction of roads, bridges, schools, phone lines and fishing boats.

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More weather trouble could be looming. El Nino is expected to bring strong rains to Mexico this winter, and another drought could strike in the spring, say weather and agricultural experts.

“Here in Mexico, after all this disaster with Pauline, people are just realizing how badly prepared we are,” said Victor Magana, an expert on atmospheric sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico here.

“I wonder what authorities are doing to be prepared for the winter El Nino system.”

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Robert Randolph of The Times’ Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.