3 Months After Hurricane, Aid Is Stuck in L.A.

Three months after Hurricane Mitch ravaged Central America, 675 tons of supplies bound for Nicaragua--including badly needed medicine--are still sitting in Los Angeles warehouses for lack of money.

The aid “is desperately needed,” said Silvio Mendez, Nicaraguan consul in Los Angeles. “It’s not doing anyone any good here.”

For Honduras, the relief supply difficulties were compounded because aid groups had to overcome suspicion that government corruption there would prevent the aid from reaching the people.

Nicaragua and Honduras were the two countries hardest hit by the Oct. 28 hurricane, which killed more than 9,000 in the Central American region.

Mountains of goods from Los Angeles and elsewhere in the United States and abroad have arrived in Central America, offering some relief to the millions affected. However, local organizations are still being forced to surmount tremendous odds to get additional aid to the homeless and hungry who critically need it.

International relief experts say the snafus offer a lesson to those who wish to help: Just send money. That helps emergency aid get to the scene immediately after disaster strikes, rather than months later.

“The best thing to do is send funds to a reputable organization,” said Hugo Prado, of the Pan-American Health Organization in Washington. “The funds can be used to buy local items, and that helps with the recovery.”

Often, when people send private aid, “the food rots. Things don’t get there,” Prado said. “Maybe the customs officials take them. I can’t speculate.”

The office of Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Los Angeles) has coordinated much of the local effort with community groups and nonprofit organizations. But her office has not gotten involved in helping transport supplies for foreign government agencies, such as the Nicaraguan Consulate. The reason is that Roybal-Allard has received reports from some constituents that supplies were stolen after they reached Central America, said Pedro Carrillo, an assistant who is overseeing the project.

Nicaraguan officials deny that corruption is a problem and say the Catholic Church is overseeing distribution. In Honduras, the evangelical churches are also stepping in.

Allegations of corruption--at a time when millions affected by the hurricane are suffering--anger Nicaraguan diplomats in Los Angeles.

Critics “prefer to just leave the food here and let it go to waste,” complained Mendez, the Nicaraguan consul. “That’s not fair.”

Much Aid Has Been Sent

Carrillo, Roybal-Allard’s deputy, said the office has overseen the shipment of more than 300 tons of supplies from the Los Angeles area in conjunction with the United Way. A 400,000-square-foot National Guard warehouse in Bell that the congresswoman helped secure was once “busting at the seams” with goods, but is now nearly empty, Carrillo said.

The remaining provisions are to be shipped by mid-February, he said.

Many essentials, such as medical supplies and food, were transported by military aircraft in the days after the disaster. Since then, hundreds of volunteers have worked in the evenings and on weekends to help sort and package the goods so they can be loaded onto cargo ships. The shipping is being paid for by more than $70,000 donated to a fund administered by the United Way.

“It’s been a good mission,” said United Way spokesman Todd Rosin. At the Nicaraguan consulate, things have not gone as smoothly. The skeletal staff was overwhelmed with goods in the days after the first appeals for aid were issued.

They managed to ship 34 containers of food and medicine, paid for in part by La Curacao, a department store chain with an outlet in the heavily Central American Pico-Union district near downtown.

But unable to round up sufficient volunteers and money, the consulate is stuck with the 675 tons of provisions sitting in three Los Angeles warehouses.

Gazing with frustration at the goods stacked around him, Mendez was trying to figure out how to get the stuff out by midnight Sunday, when his leases for all three buildings expire.

“Hopefully,” he said, standing amid huge piles of boxes and bags crammed into a 29,000-square-foot warehouse in North Hollywood, “this will be out of here by Sunday.”

The jumbled piles, some 10 to 15 feet high, contain antibiotics, painkillers, baby food, mattresses and huge bags of beans and rice.

The goods would fill 25 to 30 shipping containers, but Mendez said he only has money for 10. He needs about $50,000 more by Feb. 27, when a freighter is set to leave.

“The donations were fantastic. But after the donations, people forgot about us,” Mendez said Thursday.

The consul noted that a million Nicaraguans were displaced by the hurricane and that damage to the country’s agriculture is estimated at $1.5 billion.

Los Angeles Honduran organizations also encountered obstacles.

Xiomara Fields, president of the local Honduran-American Alliance, said her efforts to get people to donate aid were often met with suspicion by Latino residents of Los Angeles.

They had heard from friends or read on the Internet that port officials in Honduras were charging hundreds of dollars in excessive duties for charitable aid donations--something government officials roundly deny.

“People would say, ‘Are you sure this is going to get to the people?’ ” Fields said. “They think the people who work for the government are going to open the boxes and take the best stuff for themselves. When we lived there, there was always corruption, and people are really afraid to give things to the government.

“I told them look, even if out of 10 things you send, only three things get to the people, we’ve done something,” Fields said. “If we just sit here and worry about corruption, nothing is going to get there.”

Fields must have been persuasive, because she managed to collect more than a million pounds of canned food, clothing and household items in three different warehouses in Los Angeles. But the items just sat there for nearly two months.

Finally, in mid-December, she found financing for 26 containers--donated by everyone from the Honduran government to La Curacao--and the shipments started to head to Honduras. Once there, food is distributed by the Red Cross and clothes are distributed by churches, she said.

“I really think our system is working,” she said.

But those who are sending aid from Los Angeles to remote, economically depressed communities on north Honduras’ Atlantic coast--where some families lost relatives who were swept out to sea--reported far greater hurdles.

Honduran-born Ruben Reyes said he and other donors scraped together the money to send a 45-foot container of aid to Honduras in November. But when he went to Puerto Cortes in December, it had not arrived, and the shippers were unable to locate it. After repeated trips, he returned to Los Angeles.

A private relief worker at Puerto Cortes, Sulma Valencia, said her group had managed to send 70,000 pounds of food, clothes and medicine from the United States to the devastated coastal villages. But many containers sit for weeks in the port while workers seek international groups willing to transport the aid by truck. Commercial truckers charge hundreds of dollars, she said.

“Their prices have risen with the hurricane,” Valencia said. “We are all affected, and they ought to be more conscientious and charge us less--or nothing.”

International disaster expert Prado said such stories are typical. He said there is a growing consensus that monetary donations--to health organizations, international agencies and well-established private charities--are best. This will be one of the issues on the table at a special meeting in Santo Domingo in mid-February of top officials from the United Nations, UNICEF and the World Health Organization.

Prado’s organization, for example, gave international funds directly to the health ministries of Central American governments, which were immediately able to buy medicine from local suppliers for hospitals and obtain such things as fumigation services to discourage mosquito breeding, which proliferates after hurricanes and can spread malaria and dengue fever. He believes the money was wisely spent.

“Our work has been very productive and our donors have been very satisfied,” Prado said. “The proof is that, as you can see, the famous epidemics that were supposed to sweep into the wreckage like the four horses of the apocalypse have not arrived. Dengue and other diseases were expected to rise to the heavens, and it didn’t happen.”

* MORE COLOMBIAN WOES: A coffee price slump will make recovery from a devastating quake more difficult. A6

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How to Help

Monetary donations are being accepted by these Los Angeles groups to help transport supplies to Central America or to provide other aid for victims of Hurricane Mitch:

* United Way. Make checks out to United Way, Help Central America, 523 W. 6th St., Los Angeles, CA 90014.

* The Consulate of Nicaragua. Make checks out to Nicaraguan Consulate Hurricane Mitch Transportation Fund., 3303 W. Wilshire Blvd., Suite 410, Los Angeles, CA 90010.

* ASOSAL, the Assn. of Salvadorans, is accepting donations for hurricane relief aid in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras. Make checks out to Central American Relief Fund., 660 S. Bonnie Brae St., Los Angeles, CA 90057.