Uprising Feared After Storm in Central America

As desperation turned to anger among tropical storm Mitch’s survivors, Central American governments went on the defensive Thursday.

Officials throughout the region tried to explain the delays in evacuating flooded areas during the storm and the current holdups in bringing food and medicine to survivors isolated by collapsed bridges and washed-out roads.

These are crucial political issues in Central America--especially in Nicaragua--where the willingness and ability to respond to disaster become the yardstick of a government.

Analysts generally date the beginning of the fall of the Somoza family dynasty to corruption and mismanagement after the 1972 Managua earthquake. So accusations about governments botching relief efforts are historically loaded.

With the death toll mercifully slowing its climb and people absorbing the shock of confirmed fatalities that have reached more than 8,000--plus an additional 6,000 missing, whose chance of survival diminishes each day--attention is beginning to focus on how governments have performed in this emergency. Warning and evacuation measures are being judged, and ongoing relief efforts scrutinized.

Concerns are being raised increasingly in shelters for people whom Mitch left homeless, as well as on politically charged radio and television broadcasts.

Salvadorans accuse public officials of opening floodgates to save a dam on the Lempa River without warning the people living downstream. Elvis Zuniga, an official of the Salvadoran National Emergency Committee, said residents were notified last Friday--a day before the floodgates were opened--and refused to leave.

However, Gloria Gonzalez, a 24-year-old mother of four, said she knew nothing about the decision until she woke at 1 a.m. Sunday.

“We found out when we were surrounded by water,” she said bitterly at the San Carlos Lempa Refugee Center.

She and her children were evacuated by boat. However, many who lived on the shores of the Lempa were not so fortunate. They account for the bulk of the 239 fatalities that Mitch caused in their country.

Callers to Honduran television stations said their government did not move quickly enough to evacuate coastal areas as the storm--then a hurricane--approached.

Other callers complained that their country’s death toll, now 6,000, has been swollen by inept relief efforts. Both Honduran and Nicaraguan government officials said they do not have enough helicopters to get to all the survivors stranded in areas that cannot be reached in trucks.

The 35 people who fled the hamlet of Rincon de los Bueyes for a salt warehouse-turned-shelter at the intersection of two major highways here in Izapa said they have received no help from the government.

“If it weren’t for the Red Cross, we would all be dead,” said Santo Ramon, a 36-year-old farm worker. Rincon de los Bueyes lies between two major rivers, the Izapa and the Tamarindo, that united during the storm to form a torrent 3 miles wide.

Townspeople walked through waist-deep water at dawn last Friday, looking for high ground. Red Cross volunteers found them on a hill Saturday and evacuated them in a truck.

Each family received a ration package of rice, beans, oil, sugar and salt. A week later, the food had run out.

“The mayor has not come to see us, much less anyone from the national government,” Ramon said. “We are going to die of hunger.”

The issue of the efficiency of government relief is hottest in Nicaragua because of the legacy of the 1972 earthquake that killed 5,000. It is alleged that dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle stole half the relief funds sent from abroad.

Somoza also capitalized on the state of emergency that was declared because of the earthquake to seize more power, said historian Emilio Alvarez Montalvan, until recently foreign minister.

“That produced a division within the elite that weakened the government, creating a power vacuum,” he explained. “The Sandinistas filled that vacuum.”

The Marxist Sandinista National Liberation Front mobilized popular discontent with the Somoza dynasty to overthrow the dictator in 1979. That launched a decade of civil war that largely ended when the Sandinistas were voted out of office in 1990.

Government mishandling of relief for Mitch victims could have consequences just as grave, warned political analyst Oscar Rene Vargas, a disenchanted Sandinista.

The administration has tried to avoid the corruption issue by channeling relief funds through the Roman Catholic Church.

Nevertheless, Nicaraguan President Arnoldo Aleman ran into angry demonstrators as he toured the regions worst hit by flooding. On Thursday, he avoided a likely confrontation by deciding not to accompany a caravan taking aid to Posoltega, where a mountain of mud buried more than 1,200 villagers.

On Tuesday, Aleman had canceled a planned stop at Posoltega after being booed in a nearby city.

But not all of the victims stranded by the storm are angry. “The government has done its best,” said Maria Antonia Lanza, a 27-year-old mother of two who lost all her possessions when the open sewer near her home flooded. She now lives in a shantytown on the outskirts of Managua, the capital. “There are thousands of victims in every province.”

Diego Aleman of The Times’ San Salvador Bureau contributed to this report.

For the latest developments on this story, including Web links to international agencies aiding survivors in Central America, go to: https://www.latimes.com/mitch