To further press their demands, they have threatened to move their camps to the outside of buildings that house presidential, national assembly, and other government offices in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua.

Many of the rural toilers had decided to returned to their homes after an agreement with government agencies to provide them with jobs and food. But with unemployment already high in these cities, the government has only come up with 800 jobs so far.

"Instead of dying here, what we are going to do is ask for aid and start walking to Managua to urge the government to meet our demands," said one of the leaders of the peasant families.

Central America is facing the worst social disaster since the region was hit by hurricane Mitch in 1998, leaving in its wake thousands dead, injured, and missing, along with destruction calculated in the billions of dollars.

According to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), more than 1 million peasants in Central America are threatened with severe hunger. The lack of drought aid from the Nicaraguan or U.S. governments has so far claimed the lives of at least six people and resulted in the displacement of tens of thousands of peasants from the countryside. Crops worth millions of dollars have been destroyed by the drought. The number of people affected is as high as 600,000 in Nicaragua, and more than 100,000 in both Honduras and El Salvador. The UN agency says these numbers are "temporary" because they are expected to rise, and the situation will not improve until the next harvest six months from now.

"If the situation continues, the most vulnerable people could die of hunger in the next weeks," said Giuseppe Lubatti, a representative of the World Food Program (WFP) in Honduras.

The WFP has begun distributing food to the most critically affected regions in Nicaragua and Honduras, and has warned that current supplies are not enough to provide for everyone. "Right now we can only assist a little over half of the vulnerable population most affected," said Francisco Roque Castro, WFP's regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean. WFP representatives have said that the relief program will not be able to maintain its efforts for more than a month because "they don't have any more food to do it." The WFP has appealed for international donors to respond to the crisis.

The U.S. ambassador to Managua, Oliver Garza, announced that Washington--which backed a dictatorship in Nicaragua for decades, and then spent billions in an attempt to overturn a workers and peasants revolution in 1979--intends to provide a mere $6 million in food packages through nongovernmental organizations to feed 125,000 people over the next four months. It will distribute an additional $10 million for next year. The WFP has said that it needs at least $7.5 million worth of food for the next three months, to provide for people who have lost between half and all of their crops.

As with other semicolonial countries, the social catastrophe in Nicaragua has quickly brought into sharp focus the chronic impoverishment and underdevelopment imperialism has imposed on Central America. Marvin Ponce, from the Coordinating Council of Peasant Organizations of Honduras, pointed out that "the famine is not because of the drought, but because people have no money to buy food."

With the majority of arable land largely concentrated in the hands of a small number of landowning families and international corporations, millions of peasants depend for their subsistence on crops they grow as sharecroppers or on meager wages earned in large farms growing export crops.

Provoked by a drop in the price of coffee on the international market, lack of financial assistance, and bank foreclosures, farm owners have drastically cut or dismissed their workforces entirely. These moves have left some 12,000 families in the coffee producing region of Matagalpa and Jinotega without any way to survive. Some of the farm workers had not received wages for three months.

The Nicaraguan daily El Nuevo Diario reported that in the municipality of El Tuma-La Dalia in Matagalpa, which is responsible for producing 20 percent of the national coffee production, the fields are ruined.

The mayor of La Dalia told El Nuevo Diario that the municipal council had declared a state of economic emergency since they knew that the drop in the coffee prices will bring about a social disaster in the countryside that will rapidly spread to the cities.

Nicaraguan president Arnoldo Alemán dismissed the need to declare a national emergency, claiming food was guaranteed and his opponents were overblowing the issue for political reasons.

Many peasants families have also set up roadblocks, stopping trucks and other vehicles to ask for food, money, or medicine from passengers. "We are hungry, we want jobs to feed our kids," the peasants told a reporter for El Nuevo Diario as he drove by.

A group of 600 former members of the Sandinista army, as well as those who had belonged to counterrevolutionary band demobilized at the end of the armed conflict in the late 1980s, traveled through rural areas in the northern and central part of the country. They occupied thousands of acres of land in the municipality of Tipitapa, in Managua.

Meanwhile, Honduras has declared a state of emergency in 104 of its 298 municipalities. Eighty percent of the corn, beans, and sorghum crops has been lost. The minister of commerce and industry said that products will need to be imported if the grain reserves that have been released don't alleviate the situation.

Government officials in Honduras have already hinted that inflation will rise, and their counterparts in Nicaragua have said the price of bread could increase by 40 percent because of a rise in prices by the main flour distributors.

El Salvador is also being affected by an epidemic of respiratory infections, flu, and gastrointestinal diseases. So far 177 children have died from respiratory infections and 52 from diarrhea in the course of the year. More than 880,000 cases of respiratory infections have been reported, according to the ministry of health.

The Los Angeles daily La Opinion reported that El Salvador's medical association has insisted that the government declare a state of emergency. It states that the spiral of illnesses is a social problem that has plagued the country for many decades.
 
 
Related articles:
Aid now to Central America!
Guatemala protests condemn tax increase
Peasants in Colombia demand debt relief
Sugar cane growers, peasants in Mexico protest growing crisis  
 
 
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