Authorities declared a cholera and leptospirosis epidemic Friday in three Nicaraguan counties hit hard by flooding from tropical storm Mitch, confirming fears that the storm's devastation will provoke more deaths--this time from disease.
Seven people have died and 361 others are ill from diseases that health authorities believe stem from polluted waters and rodents in urban areas in the aftermath of Mitch's flooding.
All the deaths, and 138 cases of illness, are thought to be caused by leptospirosis, a bacterium that attacks the respiratory system. Laboratory tests have confirmed 190 cases of cholera. Authorities suspect that 33 more ill people were also stricken with cholera.
Since Mitch swept through Central America three weeks ago, causing an estimated 10,000 deaths, public health officials have worried that a second phase of death would be unleashed by disease.
Especially in Nicaragua and Honduras, the two countries that suffered most from flooding and mudslides, doctors and nurses have been vaccinating residents against tetanus and have initiated public health campaigns to warn against using polluted water.
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Daniel Farber, "Environment Under Fire: Imperialism and the Ecological Crisis in Central America," Monthly Review, 1993, pp. 131-133:
Central American peasants displaced by the stampede of cattle loggers, land speculators, and multinational corporations face a number of options in addition to armed resistance. Tens of thousands of families are moving into the region's rapidly growing cities in search of wage jobs in factories or on nearby agricultural estates harvesting cotton, sugar, or coffee.
Others settle on the steep slopes of the volcanoes and hillsides along the Pacific slope, clearing them of trees and other protective vegetation to plant food crops. Most of the deforested hillsides are inappropriate for agriculture and soon develop severe problems with erosion and fertility loss, flash flooding, and decreased productivity. Tens of thousands more are joining the urban informal service sector to look for incomes as street vendors, household servants, and any other tasks that offer the hope of survival.
The end results of cattle expansion therefore include the overcoming of potentially severe seasonal wage-labor shortages through the marginalization the rural peasantry. It also creates a large army of desperately poor workers residing in the city barrios. In this sense, the cattle boom has been (and continues to be) a safeguard for the economic viability of capitalist export-agriculture and industry along the Pacific coast.
Many displaced peasants escape their landless condition by moving east in advance of the cattle stampede into the tropical rainforests of the interior. Often utilizing agricultural methods ill suited to the rainforest ecosystem, migrating peasants clear and burn the forest vegetation to plant subsistence crops such as corn, beans, rice, and manioc, as well as small-scale cash crops such as coffee, chiles, bananas, and cacao. However, rainforest soils planted in crops are typically thin and poor; the nutrients normally stored and protected by the jungle canopy quickly leach out when exposed to the hard rains and burning tropical sun, and eventually the soil turns to brick. Denied access to critical financial and social services and technological inputs necessary to protect the land and improve their lives, crops soon begin to fail after a few short years. Yet, as biologist James J. Parsons points out, "enduring countless hardships and difficult living conditions on an isolated and malaria-infested fringe" is often the only available means to insure survival for the family which clears the forest and plants in its ashes.
As invasive weeds and noxious insects take over the degraded soils, these families become forced to abandon or sell their plots to a second wave of land speculators and cattle ranchers. Many others simply have their farms appropriated by the military or paramilitary personnel acting on behalf of wealthy ranchers and government officials. In areas where government repression is less overt, cattle ranchers employ wage workers to slash and burn the trees and brush and plant pasture grasses. Many landowners rent forested parcels of land or rozas to subsistence farmers, who in exchange will clear the trees and grow crops for a year or two, just long enough for the stumps rot. After this time, they will be evicted and the land seeded for pasture. New forest parcels are rented, and the process will be renewed once more.
In numerous instances, peasant families follow roads into the ford by extensive logging operations, particularly in Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. The Honduran government's Forestry Development Corporation (COHDEFOR) has cleared large areas of tropical forest in the northern provinces, contributing to the destruction of over 4.94 million acres of Honduran forests since 1960. In addition, commercial loggers clear an estimated 123,500 to 148,200 acres of pine forests annually.
Despite its potentially high economic value, however, most processes of small farmer displacement and land speculation usually waste the felled timber. Up to three-fourths of it is burned on the ground. For instance, an estimated $320 million worth of cut hardwood is burned or left to rot each year by land speculators and campesinos. The burnings create heavy influxes of ash and organic matter in local waterways, depressing Oxygen levels and causing recurring fish kills, such as on the western shore of majestic Lake Izabal in Guatemala These patterns are repeated time and again. Peasants move ever deeper into the rainforests, only to eventually lose their farms to the cattle stampede. In effect, Central America's impoverished peasantry are mere pawns in a general's game, serving as an effective vehicle for clearing the rainforests, free of charge, for wealthy ranchers.
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)