Decisions You’ll Make
up to four inches per hour while winds approached 80 miles per hour.
Homes, roads, and bridges were torn apart. Water and mud washed
out entire communities. By the time Hurricane Mitch made landfall in
South Florida as a tropical storm and eventually faded into the Atlan-
tic, an estimated ,000 people had been killed, almost all in Central
America.
Costa Rica was lucky. Despite the seven deaths and tens of millions
of dollars in property damage reported, the country had gotten off easy.
Mitch had saved its worst for two of the continent’s poorest nations,
further north—Nicaragua and Honduras.
One of every five Hondurans was left homeless. Seventy percent of
the country’s crops were lost. Up to 80 percent of its transportation
infrastructure was destroyed. Among the two million people affected
in Nicaragua, as many as 40 percent lost their homes. Thousands were
buried under mudslides extending up to ten miles long and five miles
wide. At least a thousand bodies were found floating in rivers or washed
up onshore. Staple crops like beans, rice, sugar, bananas, and coffee were
wiped out.
The aftermath defied description and comprehension. Not only were
homes gone, but the flooding and erosion had wreaked havoc on the
land. Though humanitarian aid was flowing in, picking up the pieces
would be long and hellish. When the news coverage trailed off, the rest
of the world moved on; the plight of the hurricane’s victims was soon
forgotten. Entire communities were starting over, but had little to start
with.
The heavy damage inflicted included large farming operations.
The hurricane had laid bare their dependence on modern systems like
banking to offer loans, agribusinesses to provide machinery, fertiliz-
ers and pesticides to boost yields, and public infrastructure to maintain
roads, bridges, and ports. With no products to harvest, their custom-
ers were lost to other countries. Convincing businesses, bankers, and
buyers they could rebuild, take on more debt, and withstand another
catastrophe, were it to happen, would be an uphill battle.
These pre-hurricane farms had followed the blueprints of their
counterparts in Western countries like the United States. To compete
internationally, they had turned to capital and technology to dial up