Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean

Coping with Calamity

June Carolyn Erlick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367265847
• eBook ISBN: 9781000335187
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: Coping with Calamity explores the relationship between natural disasters and civil society, immigration and diaspora communities and the long-term impact on emotional health.

Natural disasters shape history and society and, in turn, their long-range impact is determined by history and society. This is especially true in Latin America and the Caribbean, where climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of these extreme events. Ranging from pre-Columbian flooding in the Andes to the devastation of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, this book focuses on long-range recovery and recuperation, rather than short-term disaster relief. Written in the time of the coronavirus pandemic, the author shows how lessons learned about civil society, governance, climate change, inequality and trauma from natural disasters have their echoes in the challenges of today's uncertain world.

This book is well-suited to the classroom and will be an asset to students of Latin American history, environmental history and historical memory.

1

WRITING NATURAL DISASTERS

An Overview

Hurricane Fifi had smashed into Honduras in the fall of 1974, and my Lakeland, Florida, neighbor Angela Acosta Wagner had collected clothing and toys for her home community of Olanchito. As the only Spanish-speaking reporter on the Lakeland Ledger, I was assigned to accompany her on a pre-Christmas trip to the small town nestled in a valley in the Honduran mountains.

Thus, I made my very first reporting trip to Latin America to document the aftermath of a natural disaster as a 20-something journalist. I soon discovered that Acosta Wagner wanted me along not only to report on the result of Lakeland’s generosity but also to avoid government bureaucracy and possible corruption. It seemed to work. When officials noticed she had a foreign reporter in tow, the suitcases of donations sped through customs.

A year later, I took a voluntary buyout during a slight recession in the newspaper industry to travel around Latin America. I began my journey in Olanchito because I had met the townspeople there on my trip to cover the aftermath of the disaster. My new friends told me that the town had actually improved post-hurricane because of community organization and effective use of international aid for reconstruction. A neighborhood called “Sal Si Puedes”—Get Out If You Can—had been entirely rebuilt. It was now called “La Esperanza”—Hope.

The same trip would take me to Managua, Nicaragua, where things had definitely not improved after the 1972 earthquake. I toured a suffocating, depressed and depressing city without a downtown. Rubble from the earthquake three years earlier still littered where the country’s cultural and commercial center had been. I got out as fast as I could to the lakeside colonial town of Granada.

That long-ago trip inspired my interest in natural disasters and their role as catalysts. They can provoke social reform or foster corruption. They bring out the best and worst in people. They inspire poems like the paintings like Fernando Botero’s Terremoto en Popayán (Earthquake in Popayán)¹ and the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s “Maremoto” (Seaquake). Scientists investigate disasters and predict them. Psychologists try to understand the trauma they cause. For a short vulnerable moment, the wealthy can understand what it means to be poor. Disasters mobilize communities, as well as international aid and transnational efforts of the diaspora, as Acosta Wagner’s long-ago efforts illustrate.

Natural disasters are often intensely social events. A Puerto Rican friend of mine likes to say that hurricanes always produce two parties: one in anticipation as the community prepares and waits and the other to clean up and rescue. These social events—or should one say efforts—involve bringing community together, helping others, taking care of survivors, cleaning, searching and collaborating.

So I have to confess that it feels strange to be writing this book in the midst of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, a most anti-social experience in which staying safe means staying home and avoiding people. Nature is having its way, yet perhaps in some odd sense is producing community through helping others and constantly checking in, even if it’s only a virtual experience. As I write, more than 150,000 people have died in the United States—five times the number that died in the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Many people have asked me whether I am going to write about COVID-19 in this book about natural disasters. I have to tell them no, because pandemics are a whole other subject (to be addressed in another book in this series). And yet as I write this book and I read the newspapers and listen to the news, I feel as if all the lessons I have learned from experiencing and researching natural disasters and their aftermath are being played out in real time.

Every time I walk out of the house with my mask on, carefully maintaining six feet of distance from other people (sometimes if it even means almost getting run over by a car), I experience the arbitrariness, vulnerability and fragility that people feel at the hands of a natural disaster. That virus might land on me or it might not. If it does, I may get very sick or I may not get sick at all. Even if I don’t seem to be sick, I can give it to someone else. It is totally and completely being at the mercy of nature.

Yes, I can wash my hands and I can wear my mask and I can practice social distancing. But the danger is always there—just like for the people who prepare for the hurricane or the tsunami or the floods and then just find that all that preparation hasn’t quite been good enough.

In January 2020, I made a trip to Puerto Rico when the ground was still trembling with a series of earthquakes. I visited towns in the south where the quakes had hit the hardest. Engineers had started to mark houses with different colors to indicate whether they were inhabitable, able to be repaired or would have to be torn down. A completely shattered house would stand next to one that hadn’t even been touched. Arbitrary, as two months later I would learn, like the coronavirus.

When I walk in my neighborhood in Somerville, Massachusetts, I see signs saying, “We’re all in this together.” The virus does indeed strike the rich and poor, all races, ethnicities and religions. And so do natural disasters. Except, from the very beginning, other than the fact that the disaster strikes equally, the experience is different.

We’ve seen it with COVID-19. Black and Hispanic people have higher rates of infection because they often are the ones deemed essential workers, the people who service our hospitals, clean our floors, drive our trucks and tend to our elderly. They may live together with more people, increasing their chances of infection. They may have more preexisting health conditions, such as diabetes and heart problems, that make them more vulnerable.

And so it is with natural disasters. The poor in Latin America and the Caribbean (and elsewhere, as we in the United States saw all too clearly with Hurricane Katrina) tend to live in flimsy housing and in neighborhoods that are prone to flooding. They often do not have the means to prepare or have nowhere to go. And even if they may have fewer possessions than the rich, they are often reluctant to leave because of fear that they may never see their belongings again.

The breach becomes even wider in the aftermath. As with COVID-19, quick access to health care may determine whether one lives or dies. Both with COVID-19 and natural disasters, the rural and urban poor suffer because they live far from any hospital or any hospital that will take them. The poor often lack insurance for health care, and in the case of natural disasters, almost never have insurance for rebuilding. The well-off can flee to their country houses—as many in New York City did after the virus began to escalate there—and find retreats. After a natural disaster, the poor linger in camps, often for years. Or they flee to a nearby city and sometimes never return home.

Sometimes, as was the case of Olanchito, a poor community recuperates and even improves after a natural disaster as a result of reconstruction money. But, in general, if you had practically nothing and lost everything, it will be difficult to recuperate. Often, the source of employment for poor people disappears after a natural disaster, whether it is because of damage to agriculture or because a weakened economy eliminates jobs. If you are well-off and lost a lot, chances are that between insurance and your professional knowledge and connections, you will rebound fairly quickly. And that goes for your community too,

When COVID-19 hit, I wanted to believe in the great equalizer and the optimistic signs I was seeing all around town. But as time went on, I realized it was the exact same pattern that I had observed with natural disasters over the years: it painfully makes visible the breach between the rich and poor.

Indeed, despite the title of this book, and the nomenclature I use throughout, there is no such thing as a “natural” disaster. The disaster is what happens because society permits it to happen—for many different reasons as we will see.

I didn’t expect—obviously—that my research into natural disasters would provide a primer for reading and listening to the news about COVID-19. Countries are stacked up against each other: Uruguay is doing a good job; Brazil is being reckless, and so is Nicaragua; Peru has tried to implement best practices, but they don’t seem to be working. Local and state governments—both in the United States and Latin America—try to contend with the virus, working with or against the federal governments.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, coping with calamities is a reflection on how states and communities govern—in technocrat parlance, it’s called “good governance.” To some degree, the way in which a society copes with the aftermath of natural disaster reflects the economic status of the community. Richer nations and richer communities obviously have more resources and training in how to use those resources. But that’s not always the case. I read about the handling of COVID-19 in Nicaragua, Sweden and Brazil—countries of very different economic levels—that chose on a national level to minimize the impact of the virus, ignoring such basic measures as social distancing and mask-wearing. Their death tolls spiraled.

In the case of natural disasters, good governance begins even before the disaster. Students are taught in schools what to do in the case of a disaster; evacuation plans are designed and drills are held on all levels of society; and emergency plans are made for hospitals, evacuation routes and shelters. A policy is developed about how to funnel and distribute international aid. Building codes are designed and implemented. A proactive approach is taken to root out possible corruption and dangerous cost-saving methods in building. Communities are organized to respond to disasters with an appropriate alert system. And that’s before the disaster hits—or indeed before it is even imagined.

Good governance is further tested during the actual disaster. How are rescue missions organized? How is food, water, rescue supplies and medical equipment being delivered to the communities? Where will the displaced go? Are hospitals able to handle the injured, especially if some of those hospitals have been damaged? If the electricity and telecommunications networks have been damaged, how soon can they be effectively restored? What backups are there? How are volunteers and international aid coordinated? What happens to donations? Are underserved communities paid as much attention to as their wealthier neighbors?

Good governance is shorthand for good leadership. A leader—usually a president—sets the tone for coping with calamity. There’s usually a speech, sometimes inspirational, sometimes practical and ideally a combination of both. But then the leader becomes the chief delegator, coordinating efforts on several levels of government, including the distribution of foreign aid.

In a society where there has been good and effective leadership, citizens develop a level of trust. And that trust makes it easier to work together as a society. Good governance or, for that matter, bad governance, does not come about when a disaster hits. Rather, disasters amplify the existing fissures in society.

Two of the qualities of good governance—rule of law and transparency—help determine the short- and long-term outcomes of recovery and reconstruction after a natural disaster. Has effective leadership developed a respect for law so that people move toward common goals, rather than trying to gain personal advantage from a tragedy? Or even more simply put, will the citizens follow the instructions from the government?

The question of transparency is just as important. What exactly is being done to reconstruct housing? Why aren’t there enough supplies? How much aid money is coming in and how is it being distributed? What measures are being taken to stem corruption—almost always a challenge when large quantities of money are flowing in? Who is being listened to? What mistakes have been made and what lessons are there for future disasters?

And again, I hear the echoes of the news I am reading daily in the newspapers: COVID-19 is like a report card on good governance.

And what we are slowly learning with the pandemic has been tested in Latin America and the Caribbean—and indeed throughout the world—with the experience of handling natural disasters. How governments and civil society cope with calamity extends long after the hurricane, earthquake, volcano eruption or tsunami has come and gone; it extends way beyond the days of rescue and relocation, of emergency building, feeding and medical attention. It shapes societies for years to come.

Disaster experts have identified three stages of coping with calamity: preparation and emergency relief, medium-term recovery and long-term reconstruction. In general, we focus in this book on the long-term impact of natural disasters. That’s both how societies—and good governance—shape the outcome of natural disasters and how natural disasters shape societies.

Of course, the initial handling of any crisis lays the foundation for the long-term impacts, so the three stages must be taken in context. How governments and civil society deal with a disaster in its first days often provide a bellwether for how long-term reconstruction will go. Sometimes, an initial bungled response is quickly rectified by a government caught off-guard, but more often than not, we see how mismanagement in early days leads to more confusion and lack of long-term planning.

Again, I’m reminded of my daily readings about COVID-19, about life out there in the vulnerable world as I sit as a vulnerable person in my home office and write about natural disasters. In Latin America—and around the world—governments are realizing that they have to deal not only with a health crisis but also the economic, educational and lifestyle impacts of the virus. What has the COVID-19 shown us about the inequities in the health care and educational systems? And how can those be remedied? What about the divergent impacts on poor communities and people of color? What has the crisis shown us about online learning and the educational system in general? What do we think about now in terms of day-care and rights for working parents? Is a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Writing Natural Disasters: An Overview
• 2 Civil Tsunamis and Humanitarian Aid: A Test for Governance
• 3 Trauma and Collective Memory: A Flood of Emotions
• 4 Immigration and Diaspora: A Torrent of Dreams
• 5 Preparation and Recovery in Chile and Cuba: Fissures
• 6 Lessons and More Fissures: Mexico and Haiti
• Index