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From Action by Churches Together (ACT),
Geneva:
February 19, 2001
http://www.act-intl.org/
El Salvador's capital still waiting for the
next big quake
By Paul Jeffrey
In San Salvador these days, as frightening as it gets when the earth trembles and shakes,
residents are still waiting for "the big one." The earthquakes so far this year,
which caused over 1200 deaths, have all been centered in other areas of the country, and
people who live here in the nation's capital - devastated by earthquakes 14 times in the
last three centuries - are still waiting. And they're worried that their government is
woefully unprepared.
In recent years, killer quakes have hit the capital every 20 years or so. The last two
clobbered San Salvador in 1965 and 1986, causing massive destruction and death. Although
predicting quakes is far from an exact science, most people here believe the next big one
in San Salvador is just around the corner.
"We're a country that has suffered disgrace after disgrace, and yet our leaders have
done little to prevent the next disgrace," declared Bishop Medardo Gomez of the
Salvadoran Lutheran Synod. "It's obvious that we should be prepared, but each
government in turn is only interested in how it can benefit from the tragedy, so it
responds in a reactive manner and does nothing to prevent further disasters."
Gomez said the high number of deaths from the recent quakes results from his country's
vulnerability to disasters. "The poorer we are, the more vulnerable we are. These
quakes have helped us to once again discover the fragility that our poverty and misery
create," Gomez declared. "If a similar earthquake happened in Europe, there
would be victims, but not the number that we've experienced here. The same thing is true
for the recent earthquake in India. Poverty creates fertile ground for disasters."
According to environmental activist Angel Ibarra, earthquakes are just one of what he
calls the "multiple threats" faced by El Salvador. "Along with floods and
droughts and volcanic eruptions, earthquakes are part of our daily reality. They only
become disasters when they encounter our vulnerability that's rooted in marginalization,
exclusion, and environmental abuse."
Ibarra, a physician and president of the Salvadoran Environmental Unity (UES), a coalition
of more than 40 environmental groups, said the problem of vulnerability isn't taken
seriously by the government. Thus, he argued, it commits the same errors with every new
disaster.
"After the quakes this year the government reacted the same way it did after
Hurricane Mitch [in 1998], committing the same errors," Ibarra said. "History
repeats itself. These phenomena surprise the government with no contingency plan or real
preparation, so it always reacts with a bureaucratic, inefficient, centralized, and
assistentialist program, putting politicking first and responding in a way that excludes
people rather than take into account the participation of people at the grassroots."
Ibarra helped draft new legislation governing the prevention and mitigation of disasters.
Introduced in the country's Legislative Assembly last year, it hasn't emerged from a
legislative committee, despite public demonstrations outside the parliament by the bill's
supporters last June and October.
Ibarra also led a valiant but equally futile struggle to stop construction on the hills
above Santa Tecla just outside the capital, hills that in January came tumbling down on
the middle-class Las Colinas neighborhood below, killing hundreds.
The neighborhood had been built underneath a hill, part of the Cordillera del Balsamo, a
mountain range that cuts across the country, providing a source for 22 rivers, cleaning
the air of the capital city, and providing a key link in the Mesoamerican Biological
Corridor. Yet the Cordillera's soil is notoriously unstable, and Ibarra and other
activists have been working for over a decade to slow urban developments that have crept
up the sides of the mountain range, warning that the construction only increased the risk
of landslides. The environmentalists met with strong resistance from powerful construction
companies. The city of Santa Tecla, which had joined the environmental coalition in
opposing new construction above Las Colinas, was ordered last June by the El Salvador's
Supreme Court to pay almost $3 million to one construction firm that the court ruled had
lost profits because of the city's environmentally-motivated delays.
"The landslide and the deaths in Las Colinas represent a Pyrrhic victory for the
construction industry," Ibarra said. "It's their great conquest. They always
defended their work, claiming we were against progress and development."
Since the January quake, soldiers have been pouring cement into giant fissures that the
temblor opened in the Cordillera above residential neighborhoods. Ibarra claims it's too
little too late. "The government is merely trying to foist a sense of normalcy off on
people, project a sense that it is in control, that it is doing something," Ibarra
said. "Yet it's like suturing one wound on a patient who has dozens of broken bones
and whose internal organs are traumatized. It's treating cosmetic damage rather than
putting the patient in intensive care, which is what the Cordillera needs."
Ibarra claimed the government's treatment of the fissures was also an attempt to hide
evidence from several communities that are planning on suing the government for damages
they suffered during the January quake.
Two days after that fatal temblor, Ibarra's environmental coalition joined in forming a
local network of Action by Churches Together (ACT). Based in Geneva, ACT is a global
alliance of church-based relief agencies.
The local coalition, dubbed ACT El Salvador, includes the Salvadoran Lutheran Synod, the
Episcopal Church of El Salvador, Emmanuel Baptist Church, the Reformed Church, the
Salvadoran office of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), UES, and the Foundation for
Studies on the Application of Rights. ACT El Salvador - whose members are assisting more
than 200,000 Salvadorans - has issued an appeal for almost $4 million in funding for its
reconstruction work in the wake of the January 13 and February 13 quakes.
While the government of El Salvador may be doing little to get ready for the big one,
members of ACT El Salvador have been busy preparing communities throughout the country for
the next emergency.
In several communities, local churches formed rescue brigades, outfitting old vans with
first aid equipment and second-hand rescue hardware, dedicating their Sunday afternoons to
practicing their skills. When this year's quakes hit, the brigades were the first rescue
group on the scene in several communities.
In Cara Sucia, an area in the province of Ahuachapan that was hard hit by Hurricane Mitch,
LWF and other ACT El Salvador members have worked with 7,000 residents in 31 rural
villages to set 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. With assistance from ACT El Salvador, residents are also studying how
to increase agricultural production in their flood-prone villages. According to Ibarra, it
's all part of creating "a culture of prevention."
While the recent quakes did little damage in Cara Sucia, the highly-organized residents
did respond quickly, providing 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
at the same time creating the base for sustainable development of the river basin where
they live," Ibarra said.
According to an LWF official, such emergency preparedness at a local level is essential to
helping the country withstand the inevitable natural threats it faces. "We can't keep
a permanent staff waiting for disasters, so we have to have volunteers, trained people
within the network, ready to go on short notice," said Rudelmar Bueno de Faria, LWF
country representative here.
Bueno de Faria said the same participative spirit would guide ACT El Salvador's
involvement in rebuilding quake-ravaged communities throughout El Salvador.
"We prefer not to speak of reconstruction because we don't want to simply rebuild the
injustice and marginalization that existed before the quakes," Bueno de Faria said.
"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, 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 companies that built the buildings that - as in Santa Tecla - weren't
sustainable the first time around. The government just wants to repeat history, not change
the course of the country's future."
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