Tide of Misery Surges as Workers Lose Jobs in Wake of Flooding

Victor Izaguirre was born on a banana plantation and never left. The work was tough, but he enjoyed rich benefits: free housing and medical care, a company school for his 10 kids.

But the churning floodwaters of tropical storm Mitch last fall swept away the banana trees--and with them, Izaguirre’s world.

Now jobless, the third-generation Honduran banana worker must rent a house and find a job outside the lush plantations for the first time.

“I’ve never left the Tela,” fretted the 47-year-old supervisor, referring to the local subsidiary of Chiquita Brands International. “I don’t know any other place.”

Hundreds of thousands of Central Americans are in similar straits as a staggering unemployment crisis unfolds. Mitch, the deadliest natural disaster to hit the region in two centuries, wiped out major sectors of the economy, such as the banana plantations. That has set off a brutal chain reaction, as suppliers, merchants and even the government have been forced to lay off employees as well.

The surge in unemployment is fueling increased hunger and misery in one of the hemisphere’s poorest areas. And the fallout isn’t limited to Central America. Already, a stream of emigrants is headed toward the United States. President Clinton will be besieged by appeals for help during his trip to Central America beginning today. Specifically, the governments are seeking expanded U.S. trade benefits, hoping that growing commerce will create more jobs.

“This is the single most important thing the United States can do to help us with this problem,” said Moises Starkman, Honduras’ minister of international cooperation.

But it may not be enough to stem a rising tide of misery.

The scale of the sudden unemployment is immense. Agriculture, the top employer in Central America, was crippled. In a recent letter to colleagues, U.S. Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) described the job picture as something worse than the Depression of the 1930s.

“In U.S. terms, the equivalent of [the storm damage] . . . would result in nearly all persons employed in services, sales and administrative support, farming, forestry and fishing becoming unemployed,” Graham wrote in his appeal for more aid.

The job hemorrhage has aggravated an already bleak labor picture. Economists estimate that Honduras had a 40% rate of unemployment and underemployment before the hurricane. And the storm wiped out some of the best jobs for the country’s mainly unskilled laborers.

Banana Fields Are Wasteland of Rot

The banana camps offer a snapshot of the hardship and despair of the newly unemployed.

At the Chiquita fields, spread before mist-shrouded mountains near the northern city of La Lima, 7,367 employees used to plant, cut, package and ship bananas, Honduras’ No. 3 export.

Today, the fields are a brown wasteland of stumps and flattened banana branches. The warm, sultry air reeks with the saccharine odor of rot. Irrigation pipes poke from the ground.

Izaguirre worked in these fields for 27 years, rising to supervisor, with a salary of $210 a month. Not much, for sure, when you have eight children still at home. But his three-bedroom wooden house bears the prizes of his hard work: a Sony boom box, a television, framed color snapshots of the kids standing next to birthday pinatas.

“For our way of life, this is one of the best jobs, because this is a poor country,” explained Izaguirre, a stout figure with coarse brown hair.

But the floodwaters ruined most of his meager furniture. Then came an even worse blow. On Jan. 1, said Izaguirre, the plantation administrator called him in. He was fired.

“They say they’re going to put professionals in our place. I have to emigrate,” Izaguirre said, shrugging, referring to the world outside the plantation as though it were a foreign land. “I don’t know where I’ll go.”

Izaguirre was one of several dozen administrative employees let go by Tela, the Chiquita subsidiary. Most others are more fortunate and will go back to work.

The problem is, no one knows when. The company will gradually call them back as the fields are cleaned up. But it takes nine months for a new banana plant to yield fruit. And Chiquita officials acknowledge that they’ll have equipment and seeds to plant only half their Honduran fields this year--at best.

The crisis at the banana plantations has rippled outward, affecting thousands of other workers.

There are 3,000 temporary banana workers who used to pitch in with the harvest or odd jobs, many managing to get nine or 10 months’ work a year.

“The Tela employees at least have their houses. But for us, there’s nothing,” said Esteban Garcia, 38, a temporary worker whose home was destroyed by Mitch. He now lives in a nylon tent with his wife and two small children.

“We have nothing to eat but bananas--only bananas” plucked from damaged trees, he said. “We lost our corn crop.”

In the county seat of La Lima, Mayor Jose Evaristo Euceda ticked off further losses. There are the 500 jobs at the local company that supplied wood for banana workers’ homes, and scores more jobs at the banana-puree plant. Both are now closed.

The county has suspended half its employees because tax revenues have dried up. In total, 14,000 of the county’s 30,000 workers have lost their jobs.

At Finca Santa Rosa, the plantation where Izaguirre lived, men play cards or sit idly outside the clapboard company houses on rutted dirt roads. Some of their neighbors have found temporary work with the banana company removing ruined irrigation pipes. Others, with little savings and fewer hopes, have left to seek jobs elsewhere.

“How will this town survive? If there’s no work, we can’t eat,” said Froylan Lopez, 58, a grizzled company veteran whose powerful muscles were visible through a torn, soiled shirt.

Because, unlike Izaguirre, they are not permanently out of a job, most banana employees are among the elite of the unemployed. While they wait to be called back, they still have their houses, their medical care and access to company loans. Tela handed out holiday bonuses and vacation pay. It also is letting some employees farm vacant company land or sell bananas from damaged trees.

But Jimmy Zonta, the firm’s labor relations manager, acknowledged that some employees could be out of work, with no pay, for a year. For men who earn $35 a week, there is not much to tide them over. And Honduras has no government unemployment insurance.

“We have to look for some alternative for them,” Zonta said. “We can’t leave them to die of hunger.”

Hondurans Hoping for Help From U.S.

To avert rampant malnutrition, charities are stepping in, setting up work-for-food programs. In La Lima, CARE International and the U.N. World Food Program are providing parcels of rice, beans, cooking oil and other basics to hundreds of locals who clean up the county.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government and the Inter-American Development Bank have pledged $17 million for loans for small businesses smashed by the storm.

Clearly, though, these are stopgap measures.

Honduran officials are pinning their hopes for a more permanent solution on the United States, their principal trading partner. They have appealed for trade benefits for export-oriented assembly plants, known as maquiladoras. They are one of the country’s fastest-growing sectors, with 70,000 employees.

Clinton plans to bring good news on that front to Central America this week. Last Thursday, U.S. officials said Clinton will ask Congress to expand the Caribbean Basin Initiative to scrap tariffs on textiles and clothing made in the region. Other products would receive the type of tariff advantages Mexico won through the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

Maquiladoras were one of the few areas of the Honduran economy that escaped the storm relatively unscathed. Officials hope that a reduction in tariffs will prompt more plants to set up here.

But Starkman, the minister, is concerned because the Clinton proposal would provide tariff benefits only from Oct. 1 of this year until June 30, 2001.

A separate bill, introduced last month by Graham, would extend the trade benefits until 2005. Congress will consider both proposals, said a Graham aide.

Honduran officials warn that the U.S. government could face a serious problem if it doesn’t help the unemployed solve their problems at home.

These officials point to one of the few businesses here that is booming: long-range bus service. It is the last resort of thousands of jobless who have already begun their northward trek.

At the bus station in San Pedro Sula, a major city about 20 miles from La Lima, ticket vendor Rene Solano is overwhelmed by demand for the midnight bus to the Guatemalan border. Normally, two buses make the trip each night. Now, there are four or five, packed with young banana workers and farmers, fruit vendors and fishermen.

“The majority are going to the United States, looking for work. It’s all because of the hurricane,” Solano said.

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An extensive list of organizations helping victims of tropical storm Mitch is available on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/relief.