16 people officially lost their lives with the passage of Hurricane Iota, 11 from a landslide on the Matagalpa side of the Peñas Blancas cliff area, which sits on the border between the provinces of Jinotega and Matagalpa. This story recounts the incident, the search for the bodies, and some of the initial impact. There are several photos in the original article in Spanish.
“The mountain was coming down….nothing survived”
By Wilfredo Miranda Aburto in Divergentes, Nov 19, 2020
Survivors tell about the horror experienced in the Peñas Blancas Cliff, where at least 11 people died as a result of a landslide caused by hurricane Iota. It is the reconstruction of an anxious and fatal day of work, which was manipulated by the secrecy of the Ortega-Murillo government. Before the earth gave way, an intense smell of mud was felt in the community of San Martin. The avalanche razed, fractured, crushed and broke up everything that it encompassed.
Before the earth gave way, in the community of San Martin there was an intense odor of mud. Terencio Pérez smelled the danger. “That is a warning sign …I am skittish about these things,” says the man. About 2:30 in the afternoon, he hurried up the slope as fast as possible to communicate the fear to his neighbors, who, divided into 5 houses, lived higher up on the most vulnerable part of the Peñas Blancas Cliff. He spent about eight minutes recommending that they evacuate as soon as possible. “I told them that they should leave, but some stayed,” stated the small coffee producer. The story of this survivor is precise: 22 minutes later on Tuesday November 17, “the mountain was coming down.”
The avalanche, a heavy terracotta wave, engulfed everything. “There were stones, sticks, chickens and dead dogs…there was nothing that had survived,” lamented Pérez. The rain of hurricane Iota was torrential in the zone of the Peñas Blancas Cliff, located between the northern provinces of Matagalpa and Jinotega. The natural phenomenon that harshly srtuck the city of Bilwi and the Mining Triangle, converted into a tropic storm, advanced over northern Nicaragua and soaked and flooded everything in its path.
In the Peñas Blancas Cliff, a natural reserve with forests cooled by the dense fog, rain fell since Monday without stopping: the coffee fields on the slopes of this hill were soggy. In the community of San Martin in the sector of Los Roques, the families were vigilant. Even though the government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo say that they warned the victims to evacuate before the risk of Iota, some of the community members stated that prior to the tragedy they did not receive any visit from public officials.
Pérez, from his life experience, took the initiative of asking his neighbor to evacuate. He was afraid of a landslide because the earth of the Peñas Blancas Cliff was saturated with water. The soil had a soft consistency, a quagmire. “Since they were good neighbors, I went to them and told them to come on down and we will make room. There we will see how to deal with it. Two families that came down are unharmed. The rest stayed and well…they are buried,” said the man.
Pérez went down with the two evacuated families just in time. They had just arrived in the safe zone and the earth gave way. The authorities calculate that some thousand meters long and 200 meters wide of earth came loose from the Peñas Blancas Cliff. But the peasants of these communities measure it in manzanas: some seven to eight manzanas lost its support.
“The avalanche did not start in the higher part, but in the lower part. What it did was push the mountain,” describes Pérez. It was like a wedge had been removed from a segment, and all the earth from above came down. Gravity and the weight of the mass of mud did the rest. It was a wave but also a type of centrifugal mill. The avalanche razed, fractured, crushed and broke apart everything that it encompassed. In the end, when it stopped, it buried houses, corral animals, plantings, and the people…above all the victim families: women, girls, boys and men. Crushed under that cold mud, more like a mortal stew, that greatly complicated the search and rescue. A shovel that opened a hole, was filled with mud like wax, according to the volunteer rescue workers.
“The bodies were very battered”, said the priest Pablo Espinoza, very shaken. The pastor of the neighboring municipality of Rancho Grande arrived with his followers to help in the search and rescue tasks. In reality, it was the local people who started the search for the buried people. The avalanche occurred around three in the afternoon of Tuesday, but since the rain, fallen trees, mist and the fallen networks prevented immediately communicating about the tragedy, it was the neighbors from the communities (Carmen 1,2,3 and 4) with the survivors of San Martin who started to dig in the mud.
To get to the farm where the avalanche occurred, one has to follow a narrow, rocky and broken road, and then climb some four kilometers on the mountain. The rain and wind made everything more tedious. An enormous tree root blocked the road. San Martin was isolated. Around 10pm on Tuesday night the Sandinista mayor of El Tuma La Dalia, Jaime Arauz, arrived in the area, but he was not able to get in because of the closed passageway. It was not until 5am in the early morning of Wednesday that the response of the government arrived: Police, Army, the municipal government of Matagalpa, and a mechanical shovel that took hours to remove the trunk that blocked the way.
Above on the hill the community members were exhausted and nervous. Another avalanche was possible, because they were opening holes in the search for survivors. Early on Wednesday the provincial political secretary, Pedro Haslam, took control of the crisis. From that moment on, everything was concealed, in spite of the fact that the cloudy day revealed the dimension of the calamity in the Peñas Blancas Cliff.
Before outside people could enter the disaster zone, coffee farm owners calculated that the victims could be between 25-30 people. Since the five homes of San Martin were wiped out, and the hacienda did not have contact with their foremen, they believed that the magnitude of the avalanche of mud had buried everyone. The limited information that came out of Peñas Blancas crashed against that ominous memory of the tragedy of the Casitas Volcano in 1998, when Hurricane Mitch buried thousands.
Wednesday morning many of those who were believed killed by the avalanche caused by Iota began to appear in the disconcerted community. Peasants from the entire zone bolted to help in the rescue work, and with the arrival of the authorities, more than 400 people were up above.
As the search and rescue progressed, Pedro Haslam reported that four people were rescued alive and eleven were buried. Of them, they had only found the bodies of nine. Even though the voluntary rescue workers stated that there were other homes affected on the other side of the landslide, up to now the government was not reporting about that. Prior to the authorities reporting on the victims, the evangelical pastors who arrived first in San Martin already had put together a list. The religious wrote on school notepaper the names of Martha Lorena Hernández and her two children of seven months and two years of age, as well as those from the Otero family.
Basiliso Hernández, the father of Martha Lorena and grandfather of the little ones, arrived at the landslide at 3pm on Wednesday, in other words 24 hours later. He is an older peasant, but in good shape. His eyes were deep and glassy. He arrived remorseful to take away his dead, even though he did not appear devastated. “All died. The three, according to the call I received today,” Basiliso told me with that sane resilience which I have seen in so many other peasants of Nicaragua, who assimilate unforeseen tragedies with a naturalness that might seem intrinsic to them, be it since the war in the 80s, the murders in the countryside perpetrated by the armed forces of the current government, or because an avalanche buried them alive. Always ready to get over death and continue in the peacefulness of their plots of land.
Like with Basiliso, the relatives of the victims of the landslide in the Peñas Blancas Cliff were notified on Wednesday. Pedro Haslam, his followers and police took control of the situation. All information related to the avalanche was controlled and monopolized by them, in an incomprehensible desire to blur such a large and clear tragedy.
The team of DIVERGENTES and another one from Artículo 66 arrived at 6:30am at the Peñas Blancas Cliff, but at the moment of introducing ourselves as independent press, the two sub-commissioners of El Tuma La Dalia blocked our way into the controlled area of the landslide. It did not matter to them our complaint that government media were up top providing coverage. It was the same thing that we, as reporters, wanted to do. Hours later, colleagues arrived from Channel 10, La Prensa and Notimav from Matagalpa. They did not let them pass either. “Only ours are going up,” said the officer in charge. He immediately tied a thick black rope across the path to block passage.
Nevertheless, hundreds of neighboring community members from the disaster zone showed up with their shovels and picks as volunteer rescue workers. They were wiry and friendly peasants who, with consternation, looked toward the monumental cliff carpeted with trees broken by Hurricane Iota. Other men came down from San Martin to take a rest after uninterrupted hours in rescue work.
It was interviewing dozens of them that we were able to put together this journalistic story. The officers became aware of it and began to interrupt the interviews. “Walk, walk, we are in a regulated zone. Get your motorcycle out of here!” the officer in charge spit out to a peasant. Since we reporters insisted in the interviews, the officers called in four young and listless anti-riot offers to move us away from the zone, in spite of the fact that we were more than 4 kilometers from San Martin.
The bodies that the peasants, trained dogs of the Army and the rest of the rescue workers were pulling out of the mud were placed in the school of the community. A nurse in a motorcycle went up with formaldehyde to prepare them, because the status of decomposition was premature due to the state of the cadavers. It was not until the end of the afternoon that some caskets entered the mountain. Even though the Sandinista officials tried to hide them from the journalists, DIVERGENTES was able to record them before they lowered the tarp on the truck.
They were some caskets made of crude boards that had not been planned nor lacquered. Simple coffins, urgent…They were removed from the Peñas Blancas Cliff under the same secrecy ordered by the political secretary Pedro Haslam. Hidden in the trucks, they were taken to the municipal government offices in El Tuma La Dalia, where the municipal officials tried to mislead the journalists stating that “they were empty.”
The pressure that the police placed on the witnesses so they would not give interviews, now was repeated by the Sandinista officials. They prohibited the relatives of the victims from speaking. But some relatives did speak with DIVERGENTES. In the end, neither the grief nor the deaths could be hidden, even though the Ortega-Murillo Government of Pedro Haslam in Matagalpa might try. Since the natural elements that caused this terrible avalanche in the Peñas Blancas Cliff are uncontainable and always, in the end, known and felt.
At the end of the afternoon on Wednesday, a persistent light rain- the wet aftertaste of Iota – fell on the Peñas Blancas Cliff. The search and rescue for the bodies was suspended. Basiliso Hernández held a wake for this daughter and granddaughters in his home town Samulalí, and in the morning of Thursday the search was renewed in the misty forest. There were still two cadavers to be recovered. The efforts were focused on the river close to San Martin. The creek that crosses the slope served as a conduit for the heavy terracotta wave to expel some of the victims to the larger flow. There, high in the mountain, after taking a break, Terencio Pérez continues digging in the mud in search of his “good neighbors”. I do not know how we are going to recover nor how to explain it. Here there are women, children and people we know. The grief will never leave us ever,” pronounced the small coffee grower.