Clinton Offers Hope for Mitch Victims

In the shadow of a volcano where a wall of mud took 2,000 lives last autumn, President Clinton paid homage Monday to the victims of tropical storm Mitch and pledged renewed U.S. support as Nicaragua tries to rebuild.

“We are brothers and sisters,” Clinton said in Spanish, before continuing in English, “neighbors and friends. We must help each other.”

His words offered encouragement but relatively little in the way of specific aid while Congress wrestles with a nearly $1-billion program he has proposed.

The president spoke during a tour of Posoltega, a dust-choked farming community about 70 miles northwest of here. The mudslide’s scar runs down the side of Casitas Volcano, a chilling reminder of Mitch’s terror.

The emotional visit, the first here by an American president in 31 years, opened a four-day tour of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. It also opened, for Clinton, a personal window on the heartbreak and physical devastation wrought by the storm.

“I lost my whole family, and I miss them, my mama and my papa,” 7-year-old Juan Pablo Montoya Narvaez quietly told Clinton at a meeting of Mitch survivors in Posoltega, site of the single worst disaster brought by the storm. The boy was buried in mud up to his neck for two days until two men from another village pulled him out.

Clinton urged the boy to stay in school. “You can learn a lot and pray to God to take care of your mother and your father, and they will be proud of you,” the president said.

Mitch’s unrelenting rainfall spawned landslides and floods in countries just beginning to recover from decades of leftist guerrilla warfare and terror unleashed by right-wing death squads. Across Central America, an estimated 9,000 people were killed. A similar number are missing. Crops were lost not just for one season but for years into the future because soil was washed away.

“The losses have been incalculable,” Nicaraguan President Arnoldo Aleman said Monday.

Clinton spent much of his day in Posoltega and visited a makeshift memorial: the outline, etched in dirt, of the body of a young girl killed when unstable earth slid from the side of the volcano.

The wall of mud, moving as fast as 40 mph, crumbled shacks and trees, and left a community without shelter, food and, in many cases, the hope Clinton was seeking to restore.

In the village of El Porvenir, where 650 people had lived, the president visited the one house that remained.

His guide there, Alonzo Rodrigo Hurtado Rueda, a farmer, had been found hanging in a tree after the mudslide struck, barely alive. He had saved a son and a daughter but was injured too badly to save three other daughters and his wife. All told, 20 members of his extended family were killed.

“No pictures can convey the feeling of seeing the outline of that small child’s body by her grave and seeing the remnants of her skeleton . . . and hearing the story Mr. Hurtado told me about losing his [loved ones],” the president told reporters.

His travels took him down lanes dotted with small wooden crosses and past encampments of tents and shanties made from plastic sheets and corrugated metal, leaving him, he said, “moved and humbled.”

“A hurricane, a mudslide--they can destroy lives, they can destroy homes. They can destroy a life’s work,” Clinton said in a speech to the villagers. “But they must not be allowed to destroy hope.”

Underlining the political shifts occurring throughout Central America, including the electoral defeat nine years ago of Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government after years of warfare waged by the U.S.-supported Contras, the president added:

“Not so long ago, your country overcame a terrible war and emerged even stronger. You will overcome this adversity as well.”

Clinton spoke on a stage erected on a dusty, nearly treeless plain, the landscape steaming in the tropical climate.

The president has proposed a $956-million aid program, but it has been stalled in Congress by Republican leaders demanding offsetting cuts in domestic spending. Initial U.S. aid has been valued at about $300 million.

Clinton did deliver a pledge of $10.6 million for health care, training and immunizations overseen by the U.S. Agency for International Development; $12.5 million for school programs; and $1.5 million for housing.