Acts of God
In the concluding passages of Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a 59-month rainstorm floods the town of Macondo, sending animal corpses floating through courtyards and leaving the air so damp that "fish could have come in through the door and swum out the windows." Magical realism at its strangest — ...
In the concluding passages of Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, a 59-month rainstorm floods the town of Macondo, sending animal corpses floating through courtyards and leaving the air so damp that "fish could have come in through the door and swum out the windows." Magical realism at its strangest -- or life in Latin America at its most brutally realistic?
In the concluding passages of Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a 59-month rainstorm floods the town of Macondo, sending animal corpses floating through courtyards and leaving the air so damp that "fish could have come in through the door and swum out the windows." Magical realism at its strangest — or life in Latin America at its most brutally realistic?
A recent Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) study provides a more prosaic account of the economic and human costs of the frequent floods, mudslides, hurricanes, and earthquakes that beset Latin America. Titled "Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Overview of Risk" (October 2000) and authored by former IDB staff member Céline Charvériat, the 104-page report finds that Mexico leads the region in susceptibility to natural disasters with a total of 117 disasters from 1970 to 1999. Over the same period, Peru suffered the most disaster-related fatalities (72,475), while the tiny Caribbean British territory Montserrat endured the greatest proportional economic losses, equivalent to nearly 900 percent of the island’s 1997 gross domestic product. The most expensive single natural disaster in the region was a 1987 earthquake in Colombia, which totaled some $7.1 billion in damages, more than five times the amount that the U.S. government has allocated to the controversial "Plan Colombia" aid package. Overall, Latin America averages some 7,500 fatalities stemming from natural disasters each year, so even the 700 people who perished in El Salvador’s devastating earthquake last January make up less than one tenth of the region’s average annual death toll.
Perhaps the most sobering of Charvériat’s findings is that Latin America is not even the region of the world most prone to natural disasters. Asia holds that dubious distinction, with an annual average of 100.2 disasters during the 1990s, compared to Latin America’s annual average of 42.9.
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