GUATEMALA: Gaping Wounds Left by Stan Drive Country Further into Poverty

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Oct 13 2005 (IPS) - Hurricane Stan rained death and destruction on Guatemala, sinking the country even further into the depths of poverty and violence that have afflicted it for decades.

“The situation is really terrible, and will portend even greater hunger and poverty in the future,” Eduardo de León, director of the Rigoberta Menchú Foundation, told IPS in a telephone interview from Guatemala.

As of Thursday, the official death toll stood at 656, but the authorities themselves have said that it could reach over 2,000.

As far as the total number of people affected by the storm, estimates range around 250,000. Most of these victims are indigenous, and one half are minors.

Non-governmental organisations, governments and volunteers from countries around the world have joined in the effort to help the Central American nation recover from this disaster. “But the needs are so great, and the areas affected are so isolated, that it will be almost impossible to avoid hunger among many of the victims and a setback to the country’s economy,” said de León.

The Rigoberta Menchú Foundation, named for the Guatemalan indigenous activist and Nobel peace laureate, is now working on collecting donations of food, clothing and medicine for the storm victims.

The United Nations has declared that Stan, which struck Central America and southern Mexico early this month, could plunge even more of the population of Guatemala into extreme poverty, which is why it has called on the international community to pull together at least 22 million dollars in aid for the country, for the moment.

The government of President Oscar Berger has stressed that this aid is urgently needed to attend to the population’s immediate needs for water, food and health care services. But so far, Guatemala has received only 5.2 million dollars in assistance.

The torrential rain, flooding and landslides caused by the storm left hundreds dead and destroyed roads, bridges and large sections of electrical power and telephone infrastructure. In addition, at least two small villages were completely buried by mudslides.

Total economic losses are calculated at over one billion dollars.

“What we have here is the worst natural tragedy that Guatemala has suffered since the 1966 earthquake, much more serious even than Hurricane Mitch,” said de León.

Mitch struck Central America in 1998, but the country hardest hit by the storm was Honduras, where almost 6,000 people died. In Guatemala, the death toll that year was less than 300.

Mary McInerney of the U.S. chapter of the humanitarian organisation Save the Children told IPS that “the situation is now getting even worse, because due to a lack of gasoline, water and other elements, we can no longer get the needed aid to the victims.”

McInerney said children have born the brunt of Hurricane Stan, accounting for 60 percent of its victims. Many others were orphaned by the storm.

“In the shelters there are a lot of children, and they and the adults are sleeping on the floor and facing really poor sanitary conditions. Help is really needed,” she stressed.

Nils Kastberg, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, said the tragedy caused in Guatemala by Hurricane Stan “has a child’s face.”

“We don’t have exact figures yet, but the demographics of the affected areas suggest that more than a third of the victims of this tragedy are children, who are always the most vulnerable in floods and mudslides, especially in poor communities,” he remarked.

The Rigoberta Menchú Foundation predicts that Stan’s effects will be felt for several years in Guatemala.

“Hopefully this will at least serve as an opportunity to make a qualitative leap in the kind of development needed by this country, where there are so many problems,” said the foundation’s director.

Guatemala faces high rates of crime and illiteracy and low levels of education and health care. Moreover, the country has still not completely recovered from the effects of the bloody civil war that stretched from 1960 until 1996. Throughout those years, 200,000 people were killed (including 45,000 who were forcibly “disappeared”), mainly at the hands of government security forces. The majority of the victims were Mayan Indians.

Indigenous people make up 40 percent of the Guatemalan population, and live immersed in poverty and discrimination.

During the three and a half decades of civil war, roughly a million people were displaced within Guatemala, 500,000 sought refuge in neighbouring Mexico, and 250,000 children were orphaned.

The army is documented to have completely wiped out 450 villages and committed over 600 massacres, many of them in the same indigenous communities now hit hardest by Stan.

According to UNICEF, around 75,000 children suffer from severe malnutrition in Guatemala, while 67 percent of indigenous minors face chronic malnutrition. There are also 2.4 million Guatemalans with no access to health care.

And while 83.6 percent of girls and 81 percent of boys are enrolled in primary school, the quality of education is markedly deficient, and rates of absenteeism, repeated grades and dropout are extremely high, says UNICEF.

The agency has also expressed concern over the high rate of crime in the Central American nation, and particularly the extremely violent youth gangs that operate there.

10140025 ORP001 NNNN