Bolivia's Morales declares El Nino flooding a national disaster
Pastor Dale Morgan
Bolivia's Morales declares El Nino flooding a national disaster*
02.03.2007
President Evo Morales officially declared months of deadly flooding a
national disaster, committing some US$50 million (EUR38 million) to the
crisis that killed 35 people and affected some 72,000 families.
"The situation is very dramatic," Morales said at a news conference in
La Paz Wednesday after a helicopter trip over the wide stretch of the
country's eastern lowlands that is still underwater. "There were houses
out there in the rural areas where there wasn't even anywhere to land a
helicopter and drop off food and medicine."
At the tail end of a rainy season supercharged by the climate phenomenon
known as El Nino, months of heavy rains have swamped a vast floodplain
running from the Bolivian Andes north to the Amazon basin. The flooding
has drowned some 22,500 head of cattle and destroyed an estimated
200,000 hectares (494,000 acres) of cropland.
Hardest hit are the eastern states of Beni and Santa Cruz, home to both
Morales' most vocal opposition and much of the agricultural land he
intends to redistribute as part of his sweeping land reform program.
Morales had originally hesitated to declare the floods a national
disaster in part because of a potential legal loophole in his land
reform law, passed last November with the aim of setting aside as much
as a fifth of the country's territory for Bolivia's poor.
The law grants Morales' government the power to expropriate land deemed
idle or fraudulently obtained. But it also contains a clause
indefinitely exempting declared disaster areas from the government's
biannual land inspections.
Local leaders in Beni and Santa Cruz, long opponents of Morales' land
reform, had sought a broad disaster declaration that according to some
interpretations of the law would have exempted their entire states from
the inspections, even areas unaffected by the floods.
But federal officials on Wednesday were drawing up a list of the areas
to be included in the disaster declaration limiting its scope despite
its "national" tag and leaving its impact on the land reform program
uncertain, reports AP.
Floodwaters on Wednesday slowly rose in the outskirts of Trinidad, the
Beni state capital 390 kilometers (240 miles) northeast of La Paz.
Morales has ordered plans to evacuate the city of 90,000 people, but
civil defense officials have said that a slightly raised highway ringing
the city center will likely be enough to keep the water at bay.