‘We were living in paradise’

El Salvador’s earthquakes affect both rich and poor

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'God will provide.' Armenia’s young mayor, Moisés Alvarado, could hardly walk one step without being stopped by one of his constituents. One said he needed sheet metal to replace a roof, another one said no one has delivered food or water to her neighborhood. The mayor’s most frequent answer to their pleas was "Primero Dios," an expression meaning "God will provide," along with a hug or a pat on the back and a promise that help will soon be on the way.

As in other rural communities across El Salvador, in Armenia the earthquake did not kill many people but it razed thousands of houses and buildings and damaged vital infrastructure. According to government estimates, more than 64,000 homes were destroyed and 170,000 more were partially damaged by the quake. In that sense, housing was the hardest-hit sector of the Salvadoran economy. Initial estimates indicate that damage to highways and secondary roads might cost about $100 million to repair. More than 1,100 school buildings were damaged and nearly two of every five hospitals were leveled. An estimate by the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean estimated the losses at $1.3 billion.

In Armenia, a rural county with 55,000 inhabitants, the quake killed only 24 people. However, more than 14,000 homes were either totally or partially destroyed. As in most of El Salvador’s smaller cities and towns, houses in Armenia are built of adobe bricks or "bahareque," a construction technique that basically consists of spackling stick structures with mud. Many of the buildings are then topped off with large clay roof tiles, which are durable and cool under the hot tropical sun, but can collapse and kill people under their weight.

A walk through the town’s steep streets shows how the earthquake hit the houses in the poorest areas the hardest. The few buildings made with reinforced concrete are largely unscathed. Other houses, including Mercedes Perez’s adobe and tile-roofed home, were rendered uninhabitable. Like thousands of their neighbors, the Perezes are now living under a blue tarpaulin slung between a couple of trees and the remains of the wall that surrounded their yard. Even Armenia’s mayor lost his home, a bahareque addition to his autoparts store near the town square.

Alvarado acknowledged that Armenia had received some help from the central government and foreign aid agencies such as the European Union’s ECHO, which provided huge plastic barrels to supply drinking water. But he was still waiting for a first shipment of temporary shelter kits that were being distributed by El Salvador’s social investment fund for local development, FISDL.

Social audits are the most effective. Alvarado, a businessman who was elected eight months ago as the candidate of the opposition FMLN party, was hardly as critical of the central authorities as other mayors have been. President Francisco Flores and his government drew fire from opponents during the first few days after the earthquake. The charges ranged from the supposedly bungled response to the disaster to the alleged playing of political favoritism with emergency aid. To defuse such criticism, about one week after the earthquake Flores ordered that all foreign aid flown into the Comalapa airport would be shipped immediately and directly to municipalities. There, emergency supplies would be delivered in public ceremonies held in the town squares, with civil society leaders as witnesses. "There are no audits as effective as social audits," said Juan José Daboub, a chief adviser to the Salvadoran president.

Similarly, the government started distributing checks to the municipalities to pay for the cleanup of rubble, an activity that would allow local authorities to provide a modest stipend to people who had lost their homes or their jobs. However, the message was somehow confused in the media, which assumed that every family that had suffered damage to their homes would get around $200. Actually, that sum was intended to help defray both the cost of carting away debris and paying a modest stipend to the people who did the work.

El Salvador’s response to the disaster was a mixture of admirable achievements and perplexing bad calls. At its best, it could proudly show results such as the extraordinarily well organized refugee camp at the municipal stadium of Las Delicias.

At this facility run by the Salvadoran army, 654 men, women and children are living in tents donated by Canada. Tents were pitched in neat rows with named "streets," at a safe distance from the cordoned-off bleachers. People who were neighbors in their hometowns were assigned to neighboring tents. Strict rules were established to keep the camp tidy and peaceful: a maximum of five people per tent, no fires allowed in the tent areas, and everyone helps with trash pickup. Meals are cooked three times a day at a central kitchen with food donated by a private sector foundation, while religious relief workers and volunteers keep the children and teenagers busy with games and sports. "Oh, and it’s lights out at 9 p.m.," adds Lt. Col. Luis Pérez, who is in charge of the camp.

Pérez praised the aid provided by the Dominican Republic and Mexico, whose armed forces sent medical teams to El Salvador. In the Dominican tent, Capt. Bayohan Martínez, a surgeon, used a laptop computer to display a spreadsheet where his team of 19 doctors and medics kept basic health records of all the people in the camp. With a few keystrokes he could pinpoint in which tents there were children with head lice, or people with hypertension, and when they last received attention. "We constantly update this information," he added.

Other earthquake victims were not as fortunate as those housed in Las Delicias. In the nearby town of Colón, the narrow boulevard divider along its main road had been turned into an improvised tent city. Outside Santa Tecla, the huge camp at El Cafetalón was teeming with over 6,000 people, even though experience shows that small camps are much more manageable and afford much better living standards.

Getting aid out to victims has also been a huge problem. According to Salvadoran government estimates, more than 300 tons of food supplies are needed every day to feed the hundreds of thousands of people living in provisional shelters at 126 different locations.

Realizing early on that it could never reach everyone in need immediately, the government opted to deliver aid first to the worst-hit municipalities, where nearly a quarter of a million victims live. Hundreds of thousands more will have to wait for the second phase of the emergency program. "It’s absolutely understandable that lots of people are complaining that they have received no aid," said President Francisco Flores in a recent on-line chat with readers of the Washingtonpost.com. "Within our limitations, we cannot promise that we will help everybody right from the start, but we do promise to help those who need the most help."

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Date posted: March 2001

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