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.
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. The explosion threw all of them to the ground. Help was nine miles away. Funez walked with a broken jaw.