On November 16, 1998, 12-year-old Bernardo González went for a swim in a pond near Puerto Viejo, in north-central Nicaragua. The boy's outing proved fatal. He dived into the water, hitting a floating landmine that had been scattered by Hurricane Mitch, which hit the region two weeks earlier. He died three days later.
This is a horrific but not uncommon scenario in the mountainous region of the Segovias that serves as the natural border between Honduras and Nicaragua. This is the most heavily mined region in Latin America, the result of the military strategies of low-intensity conflict and guerrilla warfare in the 1980s and early 1990s. Before the hurricane, Honduras registered 200 deaths and an untold number of casualties between 1990 and 1995; in a shorter three-year period, there were 500 casualties in just two Nicaraguan hospitals near Managua. Many more casualties go unreported. Three-quarters of the victims are children.
Clearance of the 73,000 mines dotting Honduras and Nicaragua has now been complicated by the torrential rains of Mitch, which have displaced the mines into waterways and rivers, making them extremely difficult to locate. Thousands of landmines were placed around the bridges in northern Nicaragua to protect infrastructure from marauding Contra irregulars. The Sandinistas put fences and warnings around the minefields to protect civilians, but these as well as thousands of mines were flushed into the rivers of the Segovias. Arms caches stored or buried by Contras during the peace process have also been unearthed by the hurricane's downpour, and mortar rounds, grenades and rockets lie strewn across fields, forests and rivers.
The joint Honduran-Nicaraguan module of the Mission for the Removal of Landmines in Central America has concentrated its efforts primarily in heavily mined areas around infrastructure and public services, such as washed-out bridges, fallen electrical cables and communications towers. In the wake of the hurricane, strategic priority was given to these areas in order to rebuild and reestablish communication with the border areas.
Various communities in Nicaragua have complained about the priority given to strategic military infrastructure in the demining effort rather than in civilian, especially rural, areas. For example, while the area around the Esquirin bridge in Matagalpa was demined, a nearby farm known as La Misión, which has a large unmarked minefield that has already claimed four lives, has not been cleaned up. Locals have tried to demine the field, with disastrous results. "We tried to demine the area, says Heriberto Bermúdez, a foreman at the farm, "but we would only sink the mines into the bottom of a well. The children like to throw rocks into the well and explode them."
This situation highlights a desperate need for greater cooperation between international agencies engaged in demining efforts and the affected communities. The UN has held classes for some 23,000 children in Nicaragua, which includes the distribution of a comic book featuring Superman and Wonder Woman warning children about the dangers of landmines. Such educational campaigns are useful but hardly sufficient, particularly since Mitch has delayed cleanup of the landmines by at least five years. In Honduras there has been almost no effort to establish community awareness regarding landmines. Until there is a concerted effort on the part of national governments, international agencies and local communities, the legacy of war in Central America will continue stealing the lives of young and old alike.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Duben Canales is a freelance writer and author of La Musa Negra (Siglo XX, 1998). His articles have appeared in The Mexico City News and The Washington Post.
