GUATEMALA: Grim Harvest

One day last April, copper-cheeked Margarito Castro planted corn on his hillside acre near Guatemala’s volcano-ringed Lake Atitlán and prayed to the Virgin and a host of saints that rain might be plentiful and the harvest good. One morning last fortnight, after a plentiful harvest, Castro loaded the first quintal (100 lbs.) of corn into a dugout canoe and, with his two eldest sons, paddled across the deep-blue lake to the market in Panajachel.

A steady rain was falling when Castro awoke in Panajachel the next morning, and he decided to stay on another day. Twenty-four hours later there was still no letup, and streams on either side of Panajachel were swollen. Castro went to church to pray that the rains might stop. All that night torrents fell, and Castro trembled with fear that his cornpatch might be washed into the lake or buried by landslides from the mountains. Next morning he joined the village elders as they dressed an image of San Francisco in a raincoat and paraded it down the street while they chanted prayers for the town’s salvation. Half an hour after the procession, the rains stopped.

But the end of the deluge came too late for Castro and thousands of others like him. When Castro got back to his hillside, he found his wife methodically collecting straw for adobe bricks. His house had dissolved, his cornpatch was gutted, his pig and ox had strayed or drowned. Last week, as the first adobe bricks for his new house were drying in the sun, he and his family hunched round an open fire eating fresh-water crabs from Lake Atitlán. But there were no tortillas. Corn could not be bought at any price.

Castro and his family had at least survived. In Guatemala City, government officials estimated the dead in the rains and floods at 4,000. Red Cross Official Edward Russell, who led a U.S. relief party from Panama, thought 500 more likely. At least 20,000 were homeless.

Roads, railroads, bridges, herds, and banana and coffee crops had suffered perhaps $25 million damage. But it was the loss of the corn that would bring greatest hardship. For months to come, almost all corn would have to be imported.