Slate's Bizbox
articles:

Overblown

By Edward Hegstrom
Posted Saturday, Dec. 5, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty Overblown
Hurricane Mitch was deadly, but it didn't kill anywhere near 7,000 Hondurans.

By Edward Hegstrom
 Edward Hegstrom is a free-lance journalist based in Guatemala City. He writes regularly for the Houston Chronicle, Miami Herald, Newsday, and other papers. By Edward Hegstrom
(posted Friday, Dec. 4, 1998)

On Nov. 2, as journalists streamed into Nicaragua to report a landslide that killed nearly 2,000 people, Honduran President Carlos Flores went on television to remind the world of the calamity inflicted upon his country by the same storm, Hurricane Mitch.
"There are corpses everywhere, victims of landslides or of the waters," Flores said, making an appeal for massive international aid. "The most conservative calculations of the dead are in the thousands, not in the hundreds." That same day, the official Honduran death toll went from 246 to 5,000. It later reached a high of 6,748 confirmed dead.
Flores' impassioned speech helped shift the world's focus from Nicaragua to Honduras, making it sound as if a perfect storm had raked the country. The official Honduran death count also prompted a disaster relief drive and sparked a media frenzy. Harried reporters based in the region--such as me--embraced the idea that this was the natural disaster of a lifetime and reported the government's numbers.
But new evidence suggests that the Honduran government grossly exaggerated the death count. In a phrase, we were all had: the press, the relief organizations, and the public. While thousands of poor Hondurans did lose their homes in the wake of Mitch, and survivors watched as their subsistence crops washed away, I'll wager that an independent count would prove that hundreds rather than thousands of Hondurans died.
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty The first law of disaster reporting--as editors like to remind writers--is that developing countries usually underreport deaths. And, as a rule, editors insist that reporters depend on credible sources for their stories. Since almost no one in Honduras refuted Flores' extravagant body counts, his assertion went largely unchecked in the early going. The first dispatches filed by the Associated Press and Reuters about Hurricane Mitch's course through Central America recounted the difficulties of collecting accurate death tolls, but neither wire service challenged the official numbers--even though some of their reporters on the ground thought they should have done so.
The wire services play a key role in setting the tone for coverage by the rest of the media. Having cut back on foreign staff since the close of the Cold War, the major newspapers and TV networks increasing rely on the wires to provide the basic facts of a breaking story. They also depend on the wires in order to make news judgments about overseas coverage. In the case of Hurricane Mitch, assignment editors used early wire reports to decide whether the story warranted sending reporters, photographers, and film crews to the scene. When the wires declared 7,000 and then 10,000 dead in the region, editors sent jet-loads of journalists to Central America.
The press corps had little incentive to doubt the numbers once they hit the ground. Having budgeted untold thousands to fly himself and a crew down to the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa to broadcast Nightline, Ted Koppel would be nuts to downplay the storm's impact. With the pictures telling the story of the devastation and the good people of Kansas organizing food drives, it would seem downright churlish for a reporter to question a Honduran official about his body-count methodology.
The first report to question the official numbers was published in the Miami Herald, two weeks after Mitch subsided. In region after region, Herald reporters Juan O. Tamayo and Glenn Garvin failed to substantiate the official numbers. Flores, however, responded sharply to the Herald's doubts. "When we give out numbers, those are the dead bodies that have been actually been counted," Flores told the paper. "I have absolute confidence in those numbers."
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty
My own experience was probably typical of most reporters who covered the storm. By the time I arrived in Tegucigalpa on Nov. 5, Mitch was universally accepted as the hurricane of the century. Editors phoned reporters saying they wanted "color"--interviews with victims--rather than numbers.
But fanning out into the capital's neighborhoods, I found death more rare than expected. The government said it knew of 250 dead in Tegucigalpa, and some officials told me they believed the actual number of dead in the city would rise to the thousands. But the hardest hit neighborhood we reporters could find was Nueva Esperanza, where there were 14 dead. Poor Selvin Perez, who lost his wife and daughter in the storm, was subjected to dozens of interviews with color-seeking reporters.
A Reuters story from Nov. 5 quoted a government disaster commission official, Norberto Otero, as saying that a mass grave had been dug for 100 storm victims in Tegucigalpa. To confirm the story, I hired a taxi driver to take me to the neighborhood where residents said a truck had in fact dumped 20 bodies in a mass grave. I used that fact in my report.
Yet a couple of weeks later when I revisited the storm-ravaged country, I consistently found that region by region, the government's original numbers were wrong. Officials first reported 531 confirmed dead on the Bay Islands just off Honduras' Caribbean coast. When visiting reporters found just 14 dead in the islands, the government dropped its number to 81. Military leaders in the region currently put the death toll on the islands at 12.
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty In La Ceiba, a coastal city where the people are now busy hanging Christmas decorations, I learned that the official death toll is nine. The government once pegged its death toll at 979. A new report from the government's regional disaster relief office covering north-central Honduras shows 46 dead there. But a report released by the federal government two days later declared 1,426 deaths in that same area. Did the federal officials never get a copy of the report from their regional office, or did they just not read it?
Then there was the mountainous state of Santa Barbara, where the Red Cross reported 50 dead but the government counted 1,124 corpses. On Nov. 27, the day after I began asking questions about the 1,124 dead in Santa Barbara, the government released a revised death toll of 282. Even so, it continues to report absurdly high death numbers in other areas.
Some reporters who covered the storm in Honduras aren't surprised at the exaggerations. Everybody had an interest in reporting big numbers, says the Herald's Garvin. "If you are reporter, you want to cover the story of the century, and that requires lots of bodies. Editors want something they can put on the front page. Relief agencies want more aid. And the interest of local governments is so obvious it doesn't warrant detailing."
Did Flores deliberately overstate the crisis to draw international aid? Perhaps. He's a media-savvy leader who owns one of Honduras' principal newspapers, La Tribuna. A noted press manipulator, he is said to dispense favors in return for favorable stories. Flores also knows that journalists will forgive a politician for making a natural disaster sound bigger than it is but will crucify anyone who tries to downplay the story.
A postscript to my own reporting about the mass grave in Tegucigalpa: The story turns out to be false. City morgue officials explain that the storm damaged their freezer so they dug a mass grave to stow the corpses that had sat unclaimed in the morgue for months before the storm.
At last count, the Honduran government had deflated its official death count to 5,657.

Links

The Miami Herald and USA Today have created archives of news stories about Mitch. (These archives include the Herald story that first questioned official casualty numbers and a USA Today piece reporting that Honduras has suspended a local governor for inflating her region's death toll.) If you're interested in the physics of a hurricane, click here to download animated illustrations of "The Anatomy of a Hurricane" and what would happen to a home in each category of hurricane. And the American Red Cross wants to know: "Are You Ready for a Hurricane?"

Edward Hegstrom is a free-lance journalist based in Guatemala City. He writes regularly for the Houston Chronicle, Miami Herald, Newsday, and other papers.

Illustrations by Mark Alan Stamaty.
Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES
Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
The Great Debate
Marcus | Forget Biden. I'd like to see McCain face off against Palin.
Toles: Another McCain SurpriseStumped: Where's Palin's Baby?