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Honduras drowns

2020-11-29T13:06:41.349Z


Hurricanes, poverty and covid have buried the Central American country, which is moving back 20 years after three weeks of rain


Something as silly as seeing it rain in the tropics in November is a twinge in Luz Marina's stomach.

For two weeks, this 75-year-old grandmother has combined all the possible variants of non-stop raining: squall, cyclone, storm, tropical depression ... But when night falls, she says, putting her hands to her head as if she wanted to pull out her hair. , the worst moment arrives.

These are the hours when he turns on the mat listening to the water while chocolate-colored puddles form at his feet.

He has lost everything he had and has been sleeping in the mud for two weeks on a borrowed mattress in the Jerusalen neighborhood, in San Pedro Sula (Honduras), where he eats his panic attacks in silence.

After all that, that the sky, to which Luz Marina Reyes punctually dedicates several hours of prayers every day, continues to throw water, is a cruel act.

Over the past 20 days, in the Sula Valley, the population became destitute from one day to the next.

Tens of thousands of families that last month worked in the sale of food, sewing brand clothes in the maquilas or cutting bananas and African palm in the plantations now eat from charity, wear free clothes and have as a routine of the day, rummaging in the mud accumulated in their houses to rescue something: the gas tank, a chair, the jug.

The industrial heart of Honduras, if that name fits in one of the poorest countries on the continent, was devastated after 20 consecutive days of water, wind and mud from two hurricanes.

What were once modest streets of poor lighting and sanitation have become brown rivers that flow into the living room carrying refrigerators, coffee makers, sewage or dogs and cows swollen like balloons after several days in the water.

Susana, a neighbor from the Jerusalen neighborhood, cleans the interior of her home.

|

On video, Iota's passage through Honduras and the devastation it has left behind.

Photo |

Video: Gladys Serrano

“Look at how my hands are,” says Yésica Varela, 40, Luz Marina's comadre, showing the grains of her palms.

"All full of itching from rummaging in the mud," she assures embarrassed.

"Sometimes I wonder what the use of me is peeling my knees praying on the floor for all this to happen to us."

Every day he lies down with his neighbors in the Jerusalen neighborhood on a mattress next to which he has put everything he could save in the two hours he had to run when the Ulúa and the Chamelecón overflowed.

A bag of clothes, a photo album, a trophy from your son and a Bible.

"I just want to get out of here," she repeats sitting on the mattress.

Its history is the same repeated in the almost two million people who live in the Sula Valley in colonies such as La Rivera Hernández or La Planeta or municipalities such as La Lima with almost 500,000 inhabitants.

“With the first full (Eta flood) the water reached the doors, when it was around the waist it went to the house of some neighbors with double.

Height and there I spent two days.

I lost everything in the house.

When I was cleaning, ten days later, the second full arrived and the water reached the ceiling.

I spent four days at the neighbor's house and now I sleep under this plastic ”, while he watches as a 'third full' 'overflows his old house again.

A hurricane is a strange disaster.

There is no blood, there are not many deaths - about 300 in all of Central America - and it does not have the spectacular nature of the volcano or the earthquake.

However, the annihilating effect of Eta and Iota has affected 40% of the country's population, causing damage only comparable to Mitch in 1998. If we add to the national crisis that, before the hurricanes, San Pedro Sula was caravans of migrants that scare both Mexico and the United States, the catastrophe takes on the dimension of an unprecedented regional crisis.

The figures are overwhelming.

There are more than four million people affected, tens of thousands of houses destroyed, factories and crops have been lost, mountains and 110 bridges and 267 roads have been damaged or directly unusable.

The country's main airport, San Pedro Sula, has been under the mud and there are still almost 300,000 people isolated.

According to the Central Bank (BCH) the economy will fall this year by 7.5%, but after the passage of Eta and Iota now another 3 points more.

Added to a bankrupt state is the paralysis of private enterprise The productive sector of San Pedro Sula, from which 60% of the country's GDP comes, has been destroyed.

But Honduras was already a poor country before the hurricanes.

The place where all this happens has been featured in the world press for several years.

Five years ago it occupied the first positions as one of the most violent countries in the world and for two years it has been the great expulsion of people from the American continent.

Almost a hundred Hondurans leave their home every day to try to reach the United States, according to the pastoral of human mobility.

Describing the Honduran landscape can be done in two ways.

With the reports of the United Nations or the World Bank, which indicate that six out of ten Hondurans live below the poverty line and that four out of ten do not even have to buy a plate of food, which is known as extreme poverty.

The other option is to ask Gagarin Chávez, a wire-skinned bricklayer, who moves the boat's oar where his street used to be.

Under the water were the furniture, clothes, television, stove, beds and a clock.

When he arrives at the República de Honduras school, he moors the boat in the auditorium of a school with the desks piled up with phrases on the blackboard such as: "Whoever studies is exceeded" or "Let us respect the environment."

Gagarin, the son of a nostalgic man from the USSR, is one of the few who knows how to swim in the San Rafael neighborhood and between November 4 and 14, aboard a refrigerator, he says he saved 15 children.

And you, what is the most luxurious thing you lost?

“El Rotoplas”, he answers without hesitation about the water tank he had on the roof.

The misery can also be explained with the face of Fabiola Ulloa, a 23-year-old girl whom journalists find unwilling to talk hugging her baby just hours after she gave birth on a median.

She has just given birth, helped by her neighbors, on the same piece of land surrounded by rubbish that she has lived on since the water took her out of her house without a penny and a huge belly.

According to the Honduran Foreign Debt Forum (Fodesh), a non-governmental organization that studies economic policy, the Central American country will go back 20 years due to the effects of the hurricanes.

"The first caravans to leave the country are already beginning to be organized," says Pastor Dany Pacheco, from Rivera Hernández, one of the most affected neighborhoods in the capital.

"Without a pandemic, the situation was precarious and if there was any hope for getting ahead, it was washed away," says the priest as he walks through mud, mattresses, televisions, mud.

“Migration worries me because it is a dangerous route in which they can die, but I am also worried about the increase in violence that there will be,” says Pacheco, used to dealing with gang members, drug addicts and alcoholics.

Neither scenario is very hopeful in a country with violence rates at the limit.

In the last decade, Honduras was the second country most affected by hurricanes, storms or floods according to the Climate Risk Index (IRC) produced each year by

Germanwatch

.

In almost all the maps of the group of experts in climate change the region of the Gulf of Fonseca appears in red, and it is predicted that its coastal areas will soon be under the sea, like Myanmar, Dominica or the Caribbean islands of Panama.

This hurricane season, the most damaging on record, has exhausted the letters of the Latin alphabet and had to start with the Greek when it reached 30 tropical storms in a year, three in ten days.

According to Enoc Reyes, head of the Government's Climate Change office, the outlook for Honduras in the coming years does not consist of "stopping climate change, but rather how to adapt to it."

The writer Horacio Castellanos Moya described in

Insanity

the state of mind of those who witnessed the military massacres of the Civil War in Guatemala in the nineties with a phrase that served to summarize the depression that the indigenous people did not know how to describe and that today applies to an entire country washed away by water: "I am not full of mind."

For days the Government of Juan Orlando Hernández has been pleading for international aid.

According to his calculations, he will need 10 billion dollars for the reconstruction but so far he has received 75 for immediate care.

According to sources from the European Union involved in cooperation projects with Central America, it is very difficult that in the current context of pandemic this figure will increase.

To all the above evils is added the fact that the rains over Honduras were unlucky enough to start on November 4, a day after Joseph Biden and Donald Trump played the presidency.

The United States, which overturned in 1998 after Mitch and even approved a special immigration plan for the affected countries, this time has sent far less.

Specifically, a tweet from the president-elect sending his condolences.

Spain, traditionally the second largest donor in the region, will contribute less than $ 350,000.

Against this background, the Central American government's strategy is to cry out for the famous “green funds” of the international community, arguing that Honduras pays for the consequences of the excess greenhouse effect gases produced by rich countries.

In this context, the pandemic has been reduced to an anecdote, but its effects are anything but.

According to official figures, the department of Cortés, where San Pedro Sula is located, is at the forefront of the pandemic and three out of every ten Hondurans infected with the virus live here.

As if that were not enough, "we have found 35% positive cases in each shelter visited," said the San Pedro Sula Health Director, Juan José Leiva, so richly.

The pandemic had already hit the economic sectors and before the hurricanes, 51% of the country's formal companies had closed or were on the verge, according to the Honduran Council of Private Enterprise.

Given this panorama in recent days, the humanitarian organization

Doctors Without Borders

is requesting through paid inserts in the main newspapers of Honduras, the urgent hiring of psychologists to serve a population that does not stop looking to the sky to pray or to know if it will continue to rain.

Qualified personnel who can explain "Why I am not complete in mind."

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2020-11-29

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