SANTA CATARINA, Honduras -- Calixto Carranza was planting watermelons in a field flooded by Hurricane Mitch when he spotted something in the dirt.
After years of farming near the Nicaraguan border, he had seen his share of anti-personnel mines left over from civil wars in the 1980s -- small blue cans with metal sprouts out the top -- but this looked like a wheel rim.In fact, it was an anti-tank mine, much more powerful than the mines he would have recognized. When he poked it with the point of his machete, the blast threw him 80 feet into the air. His body fell to the ground in pieces.
Workers spent years compiling maps of the tens of thousands of mines left across Central America. But flooding unleashed by Hurricane Mitch a month ago scattered many of those mines across fields and villages. Nobody knows where they wound up.
"We know the waters displaced land mines, but we don't know how much, which will probably mean it will take more money and time to finish sweeping areas," said Colombian Army Lt. Col. Guillermo Leal, chief of the Organization of American States' mission to clear Central America of land mines.
Meanwhile, farmers worry that they may unwittingly become the detectors. Since the hurricane, land mines have killed three farmers and injured eight in Nicaragua and Honduras.
"We're terrified to return to the fields," said 17-year-old Genaro Funez, whose jaw was broken in the blast that killed his cousin, Carranza, in the town of Santa Catarina, 12 miles from the border.
Carranza, 34, was working in the watermelon fields with 14 people on Nov. 18. The explosion threw all of them to the ground. Another of Carranza's cousins, 17-year-old Candido Ortiz, died half an hour later in the field, his side blown open from the blast.
Help was nine miles away. Funez walked with a broken jaw. A 13-year-old boy stumbled through the mud and debris left by the hurricane, part of his forearm missing.
The others -- some cut by flying shrapnel -- followed, carrying 19-year-old Enrique Linares in a hammock because of his broken thigh.
"I'm in so much pain," Linares said at the hospital, wincing as he struggled to adjust himself on a bed that was moist from his oozing cast. "But I don't have the money to buy pain medicine."
Despite a three-year effort to remove them, more than 70,000 land mines remain in the ground in Nicaragua. The hurricane significantly altered their locations.
In central Nicaragua this week, the army began mine sweeping outside the town of Muy Muy under a destroyed bridge, where officials found anti-personnel mines poking through the mud.
In nearby Waslala, 16-year-old Bernardo Ocampo Gonzalez died Friday after a floating mine detonated as he bathed in a river.
Nicaraguan officials planned to map out their strategy this week. Meanwhile, the OAS, with the help of U.S. experts, was using satellites to see how far the rivers could have carried the mines.