Editorial
December 1998

Hurricane's unnatural rage

For seven days, from Oct. 26 to Nov. 1, Hurricane Mitch poured rain in torrents on Central America. The imagination can hardly grasp the force of nature capable of wiping entire villages off the face of the earth. Factories, hospitals, prisons and whole shantytowns were swept away by the terrible floods and mud slides.

After the rain let up, 11,000 were counted dead, and 15,000 missing, with 2.4 million people left homeless-one-third of the population of Honduras and Nicaragua. Many others lack adequate food or safe drinking water, and numerous communities have been isolated by the destruction of roads and bridges. In place of the crops that were washed away now comes the bitter harvest of hunger and disease.

Moved by the vast suffering, people around the world began sending private contributions. Not wanting to be left behind, the politicians began their pledges and calls for aid. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter visited, calling for massive aid to atone for Ronald Reagan's Contra war against the Nicaraguan revolution. He was followed by former President George Bush, who appeared to be less troubled by the actual floods than by the flood of "illegal" immigrants he foresaw if there were not sufficient aid. Next came Tipper Gore and Hillary Rodham Clinton as emissaries of the administration, whose initial $2 million pledge drew outrage and was raised to $300 million.

BLOOD-SOAKED HYPOCRISY

Do the politicians think we have forgotten the $4.5 billion in "aid" sent to Central America in the 1980s? Do they think we have forgotten that the aid was guns and dollars sent directly to the death squads that massacred not only guerrillas but peasants, workers, students, priests, nuns? Where were Carter's tears in 1980, when he sent $5.7 million in arms to the government of El Salvador, whose death squads killed 4,000 civilians and left mutilated bodies in streets and ditches? Where was George Bush's humanitarian impulse in 1989, when his troops invaded Panama, killing 2,000 civilians by bombing densely packed shantytowns?

What tears will all these benevolent exploiters shed today for the one billion people the global capitalist system entombs in the permanent disaster of absolute poverty and for the billion more who toil and suffer for a few meager dollars a day?

Even before the hurricane, Nicaragua and Honduras were among the poorest countries in the world. What most of the hurricane's victims had in common was poverty. Most working-class houses in Central America are poorly built, and many of the poor are forced to build on marginal land close to rivers or on unstable mountain slopes stripped of trees.

NOT NATURE'S FORCE ALONE

This havoc is not the child of nature alone but is equally the child of capital's limitless hunger to devour everything in its path. The damage was concentrated in deforested areas. Trees are logged for export to earn money to pay off national debt; land is cleared for cattle ranching and plantations. Peasants pushed off the best land by plantations are often forced to clear forest, farm it to exhaustion, then move on. The forest holds the soil, and the stable soil holds the water. Deforestation swelled the flood waters and multiplied the deadly mud slides.

Opposition to the ecological waste is mounting. In the 1990s indigenous peoples in Honduras and Nicaragua have joined with environmental groups to defeat government logging deals with U.S. and Taiwanese corporations. Two Honduran environmentalists were shot dead for campaigning to save the rain forest.

Even the weather can no longer be considered a purely natural phenomenon. With global warming, more and bigger hurricanes, more and bigger floods, more and bigger droughts are to be expected. But the humanitarian imperialists are loath to do anything about it. Nor did they lift a finger to stop the ecological and economic devastation of Central America that set the stage for the hurricane's destruction.

In 1902, when 40,000 people were killed by a volcano on Martinique, the great revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, observed the hypocrisy of that day's ruling "benevolent murderers," and warned them:

"But a day will come when another volcano lifts its voice of thunder: a volcano that is seething and boiling, whether you heed it or not, and will sweep the whole sanctimonious blood-spattered culture from the face of the earth. And only on its ruins will the nations come together in true humanity...."*

* The first translation of Rosa Luxemburg's "Martinique" is available from News & Letters, 36 S. Wabash, Room 1440 Chicago IL 60603. Send 50 cents and a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

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