LONDON (AlertNet) - Guatemala's government has come under fire for its tardy response to deadly landslides that buried entire villages and paralysed the small Central American country's transport network after Hurricane Stan stormed through.
"It wasn't until people were up to their necks in water that the government decided to act, and then it's very difficult to do anything," said César Diaz, director of ActionAid International in Guatemala.
The disaster has affected one in five people, more than seven times the official figure, Diaz said. The majority are poor indigenous Mayans living precariously on mountainsides.
"The government was not prepared - they never thought there could be an emergency on this scale," Diaz said, criticising the lack of proper evacuation procedures, shelters or food stockpiles.
He also blamed President Oscar Berger for playing down the crisis after the hurricane first struck Guatemala on Oct 1.
"I don't know if that's because they don't give him enough information. Or his businessman's vision doesn't allow him to see what's really going on and makes him feel it's more important not to frighten off foreign investors and tourists ...," he said.
The media focussed on two of the worst mudslides, in the highland village of Panabaj and the hamlet of Cuá near the western border town of Tacaná. But the disaster has wreaked havoc in 14 of the country's 22 departments, including the fertile, flat south coast along the Pacific, and the mountainous western highlands.
"There are estimates that some 3 million people have been directly affected," Diaz said.
The official death toll is over 660 with another 840 missing but emergency workers put the real number at around 2,000, and Diaz said some communities had still not been reached.
"Tracks are blocked, there's no way of getting there. Even by helicopter, it's very difficult because they are on hills or slopes and there's nowhere to land."
He said U.S. army helicopters had provided back-up to the limited number available locally.
Even according to conservative government statistics, almost 400,000 people have been affected in 960 different communities, and more than 100,000 are living in temporary shelters.
The Pan-American highway, which leads north to Mexico and south to El Salvador, is blocked in several places. For example, local people said the journey between the capital and Quetzaltenango, Guatemala's second city, was taking 12 hours, three times as long as usual.
ARMY BARRED FROM VILLAGE
Diaz said the Guatemalan army could have done more even though its capacity to respond has been limited by cuts implemented as part of the 1996 peace accords that ended the country's 36-year internal conflict.
"It's a resource that should be used in these cases," he said.
However, the army raises hackles among large sectors of the population. Mayans, who make up around 60 percent of Guatemalans, bore the brunt of the violence in the war that killed around 200,000 people.
Villagers in Panabaj, which lies in a region that suffered heavily during the war and where many inhabitants were sympathetic to rebel groups, stopped the army and police from coming in after the landslide, Diaz said. "They said: 'We don't want you here'."
Diaz criticised the government for not planning for disasters and over its poor system for evacuating people at risk.
"We don't have a culture of prevention. It's not like what they have in Cuba, where they have both the education and the planning to deal with emergencies," he said.
"If the government tells people evacuate - it has nowhere for people to go, and then doesn't have the resources to keep shelters going, to provide food and health care.
"People think about their belongings and prefer not to leave their houses," he said.
"That's what happened on the South Coast, where there is an early warning system. These are poor people without much ... In the highlands, there's no alerting system, let alone evacuation plans."
MARGINALISED
Guatemala is no stranger to disaster, with four active volcanoes, kilometres of winding mountain roads and rickety buses, a history of earthquakes, and a tropical location that is vulnerable from both the Pacific and Atlantic sides.
"You get heavy concentrations of rain in a short time, the earth gets saturated and you have landslides," Diaz said.
"The people who are always affected by landslides are the poor. This has to do with two main factors - the characteristics of the country that make it prone to natural disasters, and it's also a product of the socioeconomic system of a country where people are socially and economically marginalised. They are forced to live in highly risky places, on steep slopes, and then there are no conditions to prevent disasters and evacuate people," he said.
It is impossible to tell families to stop living on mountainsides. "They're going to ask you 'Where do we go? Who's going to pay for that?'" he said.
Diaz said Guatemala had one of the most unequal distributions of wealth in the world, but the small group of elites were generally unwilling to talk about poverty or uneven land distribution.
Diaz said local researchers from the Observatory of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights - DESC in Spanish - estimated it would take poor communities at least a generation to recover from Hurricane Stan. "It's hard to say if that's true, but it makes sense," he said.
