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El Salvador: When the Earth Shakes, It's the Poor Who Suffer story and photos by Paul Jeffrey Link to New World Outlook • July-August 2001

Although it's part of North America, just south of Mexico, Central America doesn't get much of our attention in the United States these days. In the 1980s, armed conflict in the region—and political debates about US involvement—made this continent-connecting area daily fare in our newspapers and on our television screens. Since then, however, Central America, with its seven mostly Spanish-speaking nations, has disappeared from our view, save for brief moments when disasters cause photogenic suffering. As we reflect on mission in the new millennium, New World Outlook thought it appropriate to take a fresh look at Central America through the eyes of Paul Jeffrey, a United Methodist missionary who has lived in the region since 1984. With this article from El Salvador, Jeffrey begins a seven-part series focused on what's happening today in the region, from Costa Rica to Belize and southern Mexico. In our next issue, he will be looking at environmental protection in Nicaragua.
—The Editors

The boy carries the door on his back; there are others in the background moving the rubble.
Omar Vasquez, 11, carries off a door his father recovered from the wreckage of their home.

The last time I went to El Salvador following an earthquake, I was taken prisoner. It was 1986, and a devastating temblor had struck the capital city of San Salvador. The next day I hitched a ride from Nicaragua to San Salvador on a rusting old plane sent by the Nicaraguan government. It was a DC-6 filled with blankets, plasma, physicians, and a handful of journalists. Rather than being received with thanks, the plane was surrounded by soldiers and we were taken prisoner.

After a few hours, marijuana-smoking soldiers escorted us at gunpoint to the military high command in the middle of the city. We were kept there until protests by the Nicaraguan ambassador got us released the next morning. Salvadoran media were forbidden to cover aid sent from Nicaragua, yet reporters were bused to the airport by the government to film the arrival of planes bearing emergency aid from the United States.

El Salvador today is a different place. The war ended with a negotiated settlement in 1992, and the party of the former guerrillas, although it lost the last presidential election in 1999, still has more deputies in the Legislative Assembly than any other political party. Calling a halt to war didn't mean an end to the violence, however. Indeed, it's worse: San Salvador today has the highest homicide rate of any city in the Western Hemisphere.

A dirty-faced, child looks scared and sad while hugging the hip of a parent.

A child in Matazano seeks comfort from his mother after a temblor.

 

Many Salvadorans who went into exile in the United States during the violence have come home. Some were deported from the United States for being undocumented or for criminal activity, including thousands of young people who brought with them the gang culture of Los Angeles. Yet enough Salvadorans remain in the United States and other northern countries to make family remittances El Salvador's biggest source of hard currency. This money sent home by emigrants amounted to some $1.75 billion in 2000, making people the number-one export product of El Salvador, far more profitable than sugar or coffee.

A 15-Year Contrast
I've been back to El Salvador many times since 1986, and so I've seen the changes develop slowly. Yet when I compare the country in 2001 to 1986, the differences are dramatic. Entering El Salvador by land a few days after a January 13 earthquake—the first of two major tremors this year—all I had to do was pay a $10 visa fee at the border. The police didn't look twice.

Everywhere I went, government officials were responsive to my questions. I photographed soldiers—eager to project a new image—unloading emergency supplies sent by church groups abroad. I interviewed former guerrillas who are now town mayors, concerned with clearing the rubble from the streets and preventing outbreaks of disease.

A lot of things had changed since the 1980s. I could even use US dollars in restaurants. In its push to catch the globalization wave, El Salvador implemented a controversial "dollarization" at the beginning of the year. With the US dollar now legal tender, the colón—named after Christopher Colombus (he was Cristóbal Colón in Spanish)—is on its way out, a victim of globalization. Yet, while the dollar is now common currency in the capital, in the countryside, where illiteracy remains high, people are suspicious. Few have calculators to punch in the 8.75 colones per dollar conversion rate.

Despite the evident differences from 15 years ago, many things remain the same. It is still the poor who suffer most from disasters. Their houses, made of adobe (mud and straw mixed together and dried in bricks) tumble quickly from the shaking. The death toll in January would have been much higher were it not for the gentle way in which the quake began, giving many people time to get out of their homes before walls started falling. As homes crumbled, the dry adobe broke into a fine dust that swirled up from the ground with every whisper of wind, painting everything sepia, leaving survivors coughing for weeks.

A Devastated Countryside
In San Augustín, a remote village in Usulután province, I found José Vasquez and his 11-year-old son Omar prying the rubble off what had been their front door. The Vasquez' house pitched forward during the January quake, the front door pinned underneath. When the door was finally extricated, Omar hoisted it on his shoulders and carried it over to a tree where the family was camped out, using scrap lumber and plastic sheeting to protect them from the unrelenting sun. "Someday, we'll build another house to go with the door," Vasquez said, leaning on an iron bar he used to pry salvageable material from the jumble of debris. "I don't know how we'll pay for it, but we have to dream about something. Otherwise we have no future." In the meantime, Vasquez added, the door would serve as a bed in his family's temporary refuge.

A man stands in waist-high debris, looking up at the remaining skeleton of the building's structure.

A scene from Santa Elena, Usulután, where the January quake destroyed more than 80 percent of the houses.

Vasquez' house once stood at the edge of the central plaza of San Augustín, a farming village of 7000 people nestled between the sugar and sesame fields of the hot coastal plain. It's a tortured place; the people had earlier withstood drought, death squads, and the floods of Hurricane Mitch. Now it looked like a bomb had fallen. I stood with Vasquez atop the rubble of his house and looked across the plaza—now filled with tents—at where the police station had stood, the mayor's office, the Catholic church. They all fell down in January, along with 1430 houses in this one village.

How are the owners of those homes going to pay for new ones? Although many families possess small plots of land that they received under the country's US-sponsored agrarian reform, that reform was designed primarily to keep peasants from supporting leftist guerrillas during the 1980s. It had nothing to do with empowering the poor. So there has been no agricultural credit or technical assistance, and today local families manage to produce meager crops of corn and beans that barely keep them alive. What capital they've managed to accumulate over the years was invested in their simple homes. So when their adobe walls disintegrated, so did their life's savings.

"The places most affected by the earthquake are already the poorest areas of the country, and life is going to get worse. Much of this country is going to stop being livable," I was told by Angel Ibarra, president of the Salvadoran Ecological Unity, a coalition of more than 40 environmental and activist groups. Ibarra's coalition has joined with several church groups to form the local network of Action by Churches Together (ACT), an international alliance of church-sponsored relief agencies that includes the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR).

Photo of 2 women - one holding a baby - walking down a rubble-strewn street.

Life goes on in Santa Elena, Usulután.

"The agrarian system has collapsed," Ibarra continued. "This means that it will be practically impossible to live in the countryside. So people will migrate to the cities and to the United States. And the government is betting on that, doing nothing to stop it, because the only thing that works in this country is the flow of dollars from our brothers and sisters in the United States. That's the only thing that keeps the economy going, but not the economy of the poor in the countryside. People in the countryside are growing more and more convinced that the only viable life for them is not here but in the United States."
Disaster Mismanagement
A physician, Ibarra could easily claim prophetic status these days. He led a futile fight last year, steering two marches through the streets of the capital to the country's Legislative Assembly in a failed attempt to convince lawmakers to set up a national civil-defense apparatus that would help the country prepare for disasters. El Salvador sits on top of several faults, but the government is always ill prepared when the ground shakes. And it's not just the government here. A United Nations report about Hurricane Mitch, which hit Central America in 1998, concluded that none of the affected countries had a proper disaster-management plan and that, when catastrophe struck, civil-defense bodies were sidelined by the politicians. As a result, once emergency teams called in for a particular incident had been disbanded, there was nobody left to apply the lessons next time around. The report said each country needed "a permanent state institution, staffed by trained disaster-management professionals" and armed with a mandate for preventive work.

The lesson wasn't learned in El Salvador, despite Ibarra's lobbying. As a result, the government quickly bungled the task of emergency management after the January quake. With the official disaster agency overwhelmed, it turned management of aid over to a committee of rich and influential members of the ruling right-wing party. They did an even worse job, so President Francisco Flores—under pressure from churches and nongovernmental organizations—finally agreed to decentralize aid management, putting the tasks of reconstruction into the hands of local mayors. While laudably moving decision making closer to the scene of the disaster, that also served handily to divert criticism from the central government. Flores made a big show of turning over sacks of money to several mayors to use in clearing the rubble that was more than two meters deep in many streets. But he tried to keep it a secret that he'd taken the money from funds already destined for municipal governments under the existing budget. And it seemed that mayors from his ruling party had a much easier time getting central-government assistance than mayors from opposition parties, especially the party of the former guerrillas.

Ibarra's civil-defense plan could have prevented much of the squabbling and waste had only the legislature adopted it.

Ibarra also led a valiant but equally futile struggle to stop the construction on the hills above Santa Tecla, a suburb of San Salvador. Ibarra and the mayor of Santa Tecla, Oscar Ortiz, went to court to stop developers who wanted to build fancy houses on the hillsides. They argued that construction was weakening the hillsides, endangering those who lived below. However, El Salvador's supreme court ruled last year that the lawsuit deprived the developers of their right to make a profit and ordered Ortiz to pay $3 million to the construction companies.

Photo of a young boy walking down a dirt hill as a woman walks in the opposite direction.

Life goes on in Santa Elena, Usulután.

As Ibarra and Ortiz had feared, when the quake struck, the hillside above the Las Colinas neighborhood came rumbling down the mountain. It buried over 600 houses, killing hundreds of people.

A Disaster Has Two Elements
I've learned in recent years to stop using the phrase "natural disaster." What disaster experts like Ibarra have taught me—and what I experienced during Hurricane Mitch in Honduras—is that a disaster has two elements. First, there's a natural hazard, or threat. This can be an earthquake, a hurricane, a drought, a volcanic eruption, and so on. These things happen, and there is not much we can do to stop them (though there is compelling evidence that global warming is making some phenomena worse).

Yet we can do something about the second element. Disasters occur when a natural hazard encounters human vulnerability. The less vulnerable a society, the less damage the natural hazard will provoke. The more vulnerable the society, the worse the disaster will be.

El Salvador experienced two major earthquakes early this year, followed by thousands of minor aftershocks. The quake on January 13, with a magnitude of 7.6 on the Richter scale, left more than 800 people dead, and a 6.6 quake on February 13 killed over 300. The two temblors caused more than $2 billion in damage, according to government estimates—damaging or destroying about a fifth of all homes as well as wrecking schools, hospitals, churches, and government offices. Compare that level of destruction with the damage caused by the strong earthquake that hit the Seattle, Washington, area on February 28. The Seattle quake measured 6.8 on the Richter scale, but, while causing significant damage, it caused no deaths. It's obvious that different degrees of vulnerability produced different levels of disaster.

Ben Wisner, a researcher in the Environmental Studies Program at Oberlin College in Ohio and coordinator of a United Nations-sponsored project on urban disasters, observes that the El Salvador quakes, along with January's killer quake in India's Gujarat state, highlight the vulnerability common to Third World nations.

"The earthquakes did not kill these people. A combination of human error, indifference, corruption, and greed killed them," Wisner said. "It is not an 'act of God' that no more than 10 percent of the multistory structures in Indian cities are built according to earthquake-resistant norms. The earthquake didn't kill. The buildings did. And the buildings go up rapidly with little planning and inspection in a boom economy like Gujarat's. In both El Salvador and Gujarat, hungry rural people have been migrating in search of work to the cities. They become squatters and they live in makeshift dwellings in some of the most potentially dangerous areas in an earthquake. They have little or nothing to invest in making their homes safer, and [they have] little incentive because they don't own the land where they have built. A shritless boy dumps dirt into a large plastic pail; he is in front of a tent-like structure made from plastic sheeting, rocks, and tin roof scraps.

Cesar Mendoza, aged 2, helps to clear rubble from his family's home.

 

"In San Salvador and Ahmadabad alike, the middle class is attracted to the rapidly growing edge of the sprawling cities. Developers and contractors rush to fill this market demand, often in too much haste to observe building codes. This is where the landslide buried hundreds in Las Colinas and where new apartment houses for Ahmadabad's salaried workers came crashing down."

Wisner proposes an international treaty that would commit governments around the world to applying low-cost solutions to prevent such tragic loss. "The engineering knowledge exists," he said. "It's possible to identify zones subject to landslide and there are building codes that would provide for survivable collapse of most buildings."

This makes perfect sense to me, but I doubt it will happen anytime soon in El Salvador. Ibarra and his colleagues have been trying for years to get the government's attention on some of these issues. They are understandably skeptical that this year's quakes will provoke any long-lasting changes in government policies. The iron grip of El Salvador's oligarchy remains strong. The culture of crony capitalism will ward off any efforts at reform. The next quake will strike, and more buildings will fall down.

Going From Poverty to Misery Rather than seeing tragedy as an opportunity to encourage democratization and justice, the rich in El Salvador have used the quake to get richer. And the poor, consequently, get poorer.

The woman walks barefoot through rocks and jagged pieces of cement.

A woman in the rubble of Santa Elena, Usulután.

In Santo Tomás, a community just outside the capital, Norma Chavez picked through the rubble of what had been her home, which she had labored for years to build by working long hours in a maquila—a final assembly plant for garments exported to the United States. "I've worked hard and never been able to stop being poor," she said. "And now this is like taking a giant step backward, going from poverty to misery." Maquilas are an increasingly important part of Central America's economic scene. They employ hundreds of thousands of people—mostly young women—to make the pants, shirts, shorts, pajamas, and now circuit boards that we use in the north. Consider what the maquilas in El Salvador did after the quake. The industry—which employs almost 70,000 workers here—made a big show of claiming it wanted to contribute to the reconstruction of the country. It offered to relocate production to hard-hit rural areas. Yet it would do this only in exchange for being allowed to lower the minimum legal wage from $144 a month to $85 a month for women working long hours, six days a week. The existing minimum wage already covered less than one-third of a family's minimum necessities, including food, housing, health care, and education. The maquila owners wanted to shove the workers from poverty to misery.

As long as fault lines of injustice crisscross this tiny land, the most densely populated in Latin America, El Salvador will remain vulnerable to the geological faults under the feet of its citizens.

A Culture of Prevention
There is some good news in this otherwise somber post-quake panorama. While traditional power centers took advantage of the quake to exacerbate class divisions and worsen the exclusion of the poor from real economic progress, many church groups saw the disaster as an opportunity to achieve real change.

The man hoes while the boy swings an axe to break up the rubble.

A father and son clear rubble in Ahuachapán.

Rudelmar Bueno de Faria, the country representative of the Lutheran World Federation and coordinator of the local ACT coalition, argued that churches—as they got involved in helping people build new houses—preferred not to speak of reconstruction. "We don't want to simply rebuild the injustice and marginalization that existed before the quakes," he told me. "We want to build a new kind of sustainable development where the community participates, where appropriate technology gets used, where there is training about the prevention and mitigation of disasters. In that kind of participative rebuilding, the people won't be objects, they'll be subjects, they'll feel useful, and in the process they'll be able to overcome much of the trauma they've experienced. The government simply doesn't understand this. The government wants to use the private sector to rebuild everything. Yet it's those private companies which built the buildings—as in Santa Tecla—that weren't sustainable the first time. The government just wants to repeat history, not change the course of the country's future."

Lessons learned by ACT-El Salvador in the wake of Hurricane Mitch helped to focus relief efforts in response to this year's earthquake disaster. After Mitch, ACT worked with 7000 residents in 31 hard-hit rural villages in the area of Cara Sucia, Ahuachapán, setting up a disaster prevention and mitigation network. Community members studied what contributed to their vulnerability, mapped out high-risk zones and escape routes, set up a community-based radio station to aid in early warning, and built a center for disaster prevention. Residents are also studying how to increase agricultural production in flood-prone villages. According to Ibarra, it's all part of creating "a culture of prevention."

While this year's quakes did little damage in Cara Sucia, the highly organized residents responded quickly to provide assistance for quake victims in other parts of the province. "They remain poor and they keep getting flooded, but they've built a new level of solidarity among themselves that makes them more resilient in the face of disaster, while also creating the base for sustainable development of the river basin where they live," Ibarra told me. The task for ACT-El Salvador is to repeat the experience of Cara Sucia in as many Salvadoran communities as possible.

No Time for Despair
Humanitarian principles accepted by respectable relief agencies, including UMCOR, prohibit discrimination based on creed, race, or sex and also proscribe using emergency assistance to proselytize for any religious or political belief.

This shirtless girl sits on a wobbly stool to do her shoolwork.

In Mantazano, a girl studies in the wake of January's quake.

In an environment as politically polarized as El Salvador's, that's a difficult row to hoe. "Both the government and the left are helping only 'their' people, so the poor who don't belong to either side are left waiting on God to help them. Those without any political affiliation who are unserved are the ones that the church looks to help," Francisco Mayorga told me. He's a school teacher and a Methodist pastor in Ahuachapán.

There was no Methodist presence in this country back in 1986. Mayorga was then living in exile in New York, where he joined a local United Methodist congregation. When he and his family returned to El Salvador after the end of the war, they brought the denominational tie with them, forging what are today six small congregations in Ahuachapán and the capital.

Mayorga walked with me through El Espino, a poor neighborhood just outside the city of Ahuachapán, where we talked with people cleaning up the rubble of their crumbled houses. His daughter Karen accompanied us. UMCOR is working with the Methodist Church in El Salvador, and Mayorga has named Karen the church's disaster coordinator. (The Methodist Church in El Salvador is small, and most leaders are family members.)

The soldiers wear masks and carry guns; collapsed and crumbling buildings are seen behind them.

Damage from the 1986 earthquake was centered on the nation's capital. In this 1986 photograph, army troops participate in emergency activities in San Salvador.

What struck me as we walked along was how relatively happy people were, joking with Mayorga despite all that had happened to them. It's something I've noticed in covering disasters over the years: the poorer you are, the less depressed you are immediately following the tragedy. The poor have so little to begin with, they have less to lose when everything tumbles down. It's led me to conclude that despair is often a privilege of class. The poor usually have no time to despair because they are so busy surviving.

As we discussed the quake with several residents, Mayorga observed that few blamed the earthquake's destruction on God. "People know that God didn't make their houses fall down. That was the responsibility of people, because we've lost our capacity to live in harmony with nature. And here," he observed wryly, "nature can be a bit rough at times."

Mayorga said the Salvadoran poor were clear about what's behind the destruction. "The poor have no education, so they can't get a good job," he said. "They have no money, so the only house they can afford to build is a simple one of rough lumber or adobe. When even a small temblor comes along, their house gets knocked down. Yet the mansions of the rich are constructed with anti-seismic materials and design. Nothing happens to them in an earthquake. When the earth shakes, it's always the poor who suffer."

UMCOR needs volunteers to work in the El Salvador earthquake response.
To find out more about this opportunity, call 1-800-918-3100 or visit
http://gbgm-umc.org/umcor/emergency/elsalvador.stm. Financial contributions may be designated for El Salvador Advance # 511447-8.


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Paul Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary in Central America. He lives in Honduras.

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Text and photographs copyright 2001 by New World Outlook: The Mission Magazine of The United Methodist Church. Used by Permission. For reprint permission, contact New World Outlook by E-mail at nwo@gbgm-umc.org.

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