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PUERTO CABEZAS, Nicaragua, Sep 08, 2007 — Hundreds gathered Friday on a beach in a remote jungle region of Nicaragua to mourn the victims of Hurricane Felix and condemn the government for doing too little to search for anyone who might have survived.

Tensions are rising between residents of the autonomous region hit by the storm and the central government as villagers complain they weren’t given enough advance warning about the monster storm and are getting little aid in its aftermath.

A government official refused to give scarce gasoline Friday to 48-year-old Zacarias Loren, whose 19-year-old son was with a group of 18 people diving for lobster off a distant cay when the storm hit.

“These lives are important, too,” Loren said. “They might be floating alive, but they are out there alone.”

One woman, a 19-year-old whose mother had been working on a cay selling food and supplies to lobster fishermen, cried out under the gray sky: “Why did you have to go? Why didn’t you take me with you?”

Disgruntled villagers came together on beach the region’s main town, Puerto Cabezas, which has become the hub of relief efforts and official search missions for any survivors. Others set out on their own to try to find missing loved ones.

The eye of the hurricane passed directly over the Honduran-Nicaraguan coast, devastating seaside villages and island fishing hubs that were home to the Miskito Indians, descendants of Indians, European settlers and African slaves. The region has a long-standing mistrust of the central government, and is reachable only by plane or canoe in good weather.

Survivors from fishing communities off the coast said Nicaraguan authorities sailed by and sent out evacuation warnings only hours before the eye hit. Many lobster divers were already out at sea by then, and the waves and wind were too strong for their primitive sailboats. Hundreds of others were trapped on tiny distant cayes swallowed whole by the violent storm surge.

The death toll has ranged from 49 to more than 100, but no one has been able to tally the missing. It is likely no one will ever know how many lives were lost in the Category-5 storm.

Felix devastated the Miskito Indians’ barrier islands – leaving only a few tree trunks where primitive dwellings once stood and filling the sea with debris. It also ruined the bumpy red-dirt tracks that connected the region’s larger communities, complicating efforts to deliver supplies in the disaster area.

The storm hit during the last two weeks of lobster season, the main source of income for most residents. Hundreds of fishermen and lobster divers, many of whom swim deep to the ocean floor simply by holding their breath, were caught at sea in open boats. Many women who work small businesses on the reefs selling food and supplies to the lobstermen were marooned.

Among them was Aurora Prada, a 39-year-old single mother of five, who said the sea was already wild by the time they received word of the fast-approaching hurricane. She piled into a boat with several others and rode out the storm in a swampy, protected area of the cayes. They spent hours bailing out seawater as bodies floated by, and were eventually rescued by a passing boat.

“The government is partly to blame because they warned us really late,” she said.

Frustrated by the lack of progress, many have searched the sea themselves and buried bodies without notifying authorities. Even some bodies brought back to the rescue effort’s hub in Puerto Cabezas have been put in graves without being identified, making future efforts at separating the missing from the dead nearly impossible.

Miscommunication and mistrust have not helped.

On Friday, authorities said some reports from remote areas turned out to be more rumor than fact. Honduran officials initially reported 150 Nicaraguans had been rescued from the sea. They later adjusted the figure to 52, and emergency chief Marcos Burgos said Friday that he was sure of only 28. He also said a Honduran Indian leader’s report of 25 bodies washing ashore could not be confirmed.

“We know that three or four cadavers were found by Honduran fishermen who notified families of the victims in Nicaragua, and they were supposedly taken to be buried in their hometown, but we can’t confirm that,” he said. “These indigenous people have no borders. For them, Honduras is the same as Nicaragua.

“Afterward, they realized they made a mistake taking the bodies across a border without permission, and now they won’t talk. They won’t say anything to police.”

On Thursday, about 500 people crowded a pier in Puerto Cabezas overlooking a beach where 13 bloated bodies had been laid out on black tarps after being pulled from the sea, their arms reaching for the sky. Some relatives of the missing tried to rush down a small wooden stairway to reach the bodies but were held back by police.

Food, medical help, mattresses and other aid continued to arrive from the U.S., Venezuela and Cuban governments, as well as nonprofits throughout the Americas. But hurricane survivors in villages reachable only by helicopter still lacked food, water and fuel. These communities are used to fending for themselves, but Felix wiped out their crops, wrecked their boats and contaminated drinking water with debris and dead animals.

The death toll from Hurricane Felix which struck Nicaragua three days ago may run into the thousands, but accurate figures have yet to be established, according to Nicaraguan newspapers.

The daily La Prensa newspaper quotes Carlos Solano of the National Army’s Special Operations Committee as saying the figure might run as high as 3,000 because some areas of the affected regions have not been reached yet.

According to the paper, the river Coco has risen 11.5 metres above its normal levels and there are reports that some dwellings are already under water. There’s also a danger of landslides, it adds, quoting doctors as saying that wells contaminated by the hurricane could cause diarrhoea and dengue.

An improvised hospital in the affected North Atlantic Autonomous Region is already full and people in need of medical help have been being turned away, says the El Nuevo Diario. Most of the casualties are dehydrated, sun-burned and traumatised. Medical staff, who have been stretched to the limit, have run out of essential drugs and are having to resort to private pharmacies.

The country has so far received aid from Venezuela, United States, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama and Guatemala, according to the Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega, quoted by La Prensa. He also acknowledged that it won’t be possible to reach some of the remote areas affected by the hurricane immediately.

The paper reports the European Union has offered $1 million for the initial emergency response, which will be used to buy hygiene kits, food and drinking water. Japan will be sending $100,000 of tents, blankets, plastic sheeting and electricity generators.

The total amount of U.S. aid exceeds $200,000 U.S. dollars, but U.S. ambassador Paul Trivelli was keen to stress that it represents help for the people of Nicaragua and not the government of the left-leaning president.

The U.N.’s World Food Programme (WFP) has allocated $250,000 to the emergency and various aid agencies are supporting local partner organisations or responding directly on the ground.

President Ortega promised electricity and drinking water within the next seven days, La Jornada reports. But as he points out, the reconstruction will be long and difficult.

A 50-year-old Miskito woman named Rose Cunningham, was the early warning system for dozens of impoverished Nicaraguan communities that took a direct hit from Hurricane Felix on Tuesday. Rose, who directs a small community development organization in the nearby town of Waspam, had the benefit of Internet access the day before the storm hit the country’s North Atlantic Coast. She could see on the screen what the Nicaraguan government also knew: that the Indigenous communities along the banks of the Coco River on the Nicaraguan-Honduran border were right in the path of the Category Five hurricane.

Although the sky was already black and the Coco River was raging, Rose traveled along the river shouting warnings of the coming storm to hundreds of families whose rickety wooden homes stand precariously on stilts along the riverbank. Thanks to Rose, parents were able to gather their children and run to higher ground. But most people’s homes were broken like matchsticks and swept away by the 160-mile-an-hour winds that pounded the area within hours of Rose’s warning.

Most of the families lost their homes, their harvests, and all of their possessions. With no emergency shelters nearby, people were left exposed to the torrential rains of the hurricane. Now all they can do is wait for the next phase of the assault: life-threatening flash floods and mudslides. For these families-denied adequate warning and the infrastructure and resources needed to survive the storm-the disaster of Hurricane Felix is anything but natural.

In fact, the vulnerability of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast comes from years of discrimination and government neglect. These are the same communities that were devastated by Hurricane Mitch, which killed more than 10,000 people in 1998. Yet, they still have not been equipped with an early storm warning system, health or sanitation infrastructure, or any of the public services that are critical to survival and recovery in a hurricane.

Speaking with MADRE by satellite phone on September 4, Rose Cunningham commented, “The national government is obligated by international standards-as are all governments-to prevent the worst impacts of such storms. But here the people live in deep poverty, right at the edge of the river. There are no clinics or emergency workers. No phones, no electricity. We have never had these resources and now we need them more than ever.”

Natural Disaster or Disastrous Policies?

The term “natural disaster” has always obscured the disproportionate impact of such events on poor communities. But today, even the force of the hurricanes we face may not be entirely natural. Many scientists believe that storms are intensifying as sea temperatures rise due to global warming. Hurricane Felix’s landfall, on the heels of last month’s Hurricane Dean, marks the first time in more than 120 years that two Category Five storms have hit land in the same season. In fact, of the 31 Category Five storms ever recorded in the Atlantic, eight of them have struck in the last five seasons. And Felix intensified faster than any storm on record.

The main causes of global warming, as we know, are greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the unsustainable use of fossil fuels. And it’s not the government of Nicaragua-or any other poor country-that bears primary responsibility for the problem. The biggest culprits are industrialized countries, led by the US. In fact, the human impacts of climate change represent a deeply unjust dynamic: while economic polices and consumption habits in rich countries are driving global warming, the harshest consequences are being borne by poor countries, where communities continue to be denied resources for survival and recovery.

Within these communities, women are often hardest hit when disaster strikes because they are over-represented among the poor and often have no safety net. Women are also primarily responsible for those made most vulnerable by disaster-children, the elderly, and people who are ill or disabled. “We know from experience that the worst is yet to come,” said Rose Cunningham. “The flooding and mudslides will bring outbreaks of malaria and cholera. People will have no choice but to drink dirty water. Our children and elders will suffer diarrhea. It seems a simple ailment, but without clean water, diarrhea is deadly to babies and old people. The children will ask their mothers for food and water. What will their mothers tell them?”

The Day After

Across Nicaragua’s North Atlantic Coast, people’s lives and livelihoods lie in ruins. But Rose Cunningham and the women she has been organizing with for years began mobilizing an emergency response even before the storm passed. “We may not have the helicopters and media attention of the large aid agencies,” said Rose, “but we have our networks and we are doing what we can.”

Rose turned to MADRE, an international women’s human rights organization that has worked in partnership with Indigenous women’s community-based organizations in Nicaragua since 1983. MADRE immediately launched an emergency relief effort to provide temporary shelters, water purification tablets, antibiotics, mosquito netting, and other necessities to communities hardest hit by the storm.

Rose worked with MADRE in 1998, during Hurricane Mitch, when some emergency response teams didn’t know where Indigenous villages were, much less how to reach them in flood conditions. “With the resources from MADRE we were able to bring aid directly to the women and families who needed it most,” recalls Rose “and that’s what we must do now. We live here. We know which families have a new baby or someone who cannot walk. We know how to cross the river when the water is angry and we know that aid must be handed to the women, to the mothers, because they are in charge of meeting their families’ needs.”

Disasters such as Hurricane Felix may have global implications, but they are always local events. And the women in the communities devastated by this storm are not only victims of the disaster, they are also first-responders. We wouldn’t expect a fire fighter to go into a burning building without equipment, resources, and training. Let’s make sure that the women of Nicaragua have the resources they deserve to ensure their families’ survival and begin the tremendous job of rebuilding their lives and communities.

PUERTO CABEZAS, Nicaragua – Bodies of Miskito Indians killed by Hurricane Felix floated in the Caribbean off Central America and washed up on beaches on Thursday as the death toll from the storm rose to over 60.

Many of the dead were traveling by boat when they were hit by huge waves as Felix struck near the border between Honduras and Nicaragua on Tuesday as a giant Category 5 storm.

Other victims appeared to have been sucked away from their flimsy shacks on the shore. Nicaraguan fishermen told reporters they saw bodies of people still tied to trees in a vain bid to stay safe from winds of 160 mph (256 kph) and roaring seas.

“We have at 42 people dead,” local Gov. Reynaldo Francis told reporters, adding that he expected that figure to rise. “In Honduras and in our territory on the coast … more are appearing,” he said.

Relatives sheltering in the port of Puerto Cabezas wept as soldiers in small boats carrying emergency food returned from tiny coastal villages and reported inhabitants missing. Others rejoiced as boats brought bedraggled survivors to the port.

The fierce storm struck fear into the local people.

“They told us a hurricane was coming and all the men and women were in their houses crying,” said Ana Isolina Alvarado, an indigenous woman arriving from one of the tiny Cayos Miskitos islets in a fishing boat. She took refuge from the storm in the boat after it got trapped in nearby mangroves.

She told a local television channel that four of her family were missing and dozens more from her village.

Up to 25 bodies floated in the sea near the Nicaraguan border on Thursday, the Honduran civil protection agency said.

Reviving memories of Hurricane Mitch, which killed 10,000 people in Central America in 1998, Felix smashed up thousands of flimsy wooden homes in Nicaragua, flattened trees and made barely developed jungle areas even less passable than normal.

It mainly hit the turtle-fishing Miskitos, who formed a British protectorate until the 19th century and still live in wooden shacks in isolated and sparsely populated marshlands dotted with lagoons and crocodile-infested rivers. Some 35,000 of them live in Honduras and more than 100,000 in Nicaragua.

BODIES FLOATING

Aerial images showed the area strewn with debris.

Felix came on the heels of another deadly Category 5 storm, Hurricane Dean — the first time on record that two Atlantic storms made landfall as Category 5 hurricanes in one season.

An exact number of dead and missing was hard to come by. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said on Wednesday that more than 200 people were missing, but 52 Miskito Indian survivors were later fished out of the sea off Honduras.

“They were holding onto planks and buoys for hours,” said local Honduran deputy Carolina Echeverria. The Navy was amazed when it found the Miskito Indians near Raya, close to the Nicaraguan border.

Half the group were in good enough shape to be sent home on a Nicaraguan Navy boat, while the rest were taken to hospitals in Honduras.

Teams of Nicaraguan soldiers distributed food to cut-off villagers surviving on nothing but coconuts.

“We are still waiting for help,” a Miskito woman called Lilian told reporters in her coastal hamlet where 2,000 people stood helplessly in the debris of their wrecked homes.