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Risk and the Neoliberal State: Why Post-Mitch
Lessons Didn't Reduce El Salvador's Earthquake Losses1
By Ben Wisner2
The cause of our problems is the oligarchy, that tiny group of families
which has no concern for the hunger of the people, but in fact needs it
in order to have cheap and abundant labor to export its crops.
- Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero,
assassinated March 1980.
El Salvador suffered two severe earthquakes in January and February, 2001, as well
of thousands of aftershocks. 1,159 people are thought to have been killed, 8,122 injured,
and more than 150,000 homes destroyed. An additional 185,000 homes were damaged.
Infrastructure was also heavily affected. This includes 23 hospitals and another 121
health care units and 1,566 schools that were damaged. That is roughly 40% of hospital
capacity, and likewise, 30% of the nation's schools. Total economic loss is estimated at
$1.255 billion (GOES, 2001). (3)
These losses are less than those produced by the
catastrophe that occurred about the same time in Gujarat in India. However, for a small
country of 6 million people, a society struggling to reorganize itself following a long
civil war, and a weak economy, El Salvador's earthquake losses are very significant. The
economic losses amount to 10% of GNP and one-half of the annual national government
budget.
Could these losses have been less in El Salvador? Are there lessons that the national
government and municipal governments should have learned from hurricane Mitch (1998)? I
believe that the answers to both these questions is emphatically "yes." In the
following I will explain why, focusing on four things. (1) The effect that the
government's dogmatic commitment to neoliberal economic principles has had on the ability
of the national level state to understand and to implement prevention and mitigation
strategies; (2) The problem of weak municipal governments; (3) The role of NGOs and of
civil society in promoting mitigation and prevention strategies; (4) Positive steps that
could be taken despite constraints and limitations.
El Salvador: A Permanent State of Emergency
Lavell describes the Central American isthmus as "one of the most disaster-prone
areas of the world" (Lavell, 1994:49). El Salvador, as part of that geographical
region, experiences many extreme natural events: hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic
eruptions, floods, droughts, wildfires, landslides, as well as epidemics of cholera,
malaria, and dengue. Some of these have been large enough to attract national or foreign
attention, such as earthquakes in 1965 and 1986, hurricanes in 1969 and 1998, landslides,
floods, and mosquito born disease triggered by El Nino rains in 1988. Going back further
in history, San Salvador, the capital and primate city, has been seriously damaged no
fewer than 14 times by earthquakes over the past three centuries, nine times by local
earthquakes in the nearby volcanic region and five times by earthquakes in the subduction
zone some 50 km off the coast under the Pacific Ocean (Bommer, 1996:2).
However, as Lavell and other authors have repeatedly pointed out, it takes more than an
extreme natural event to produce a disaster (Blaikie et al., 1994; Hewitt, 1996; Lavell,
1998; Cannon, 2000). Extreme events, such as those affecting El Salvador, kill and produce
losses because human beings, their creations and livelihoods, are in harms way. Risk is a
function of the extreme event (a "hazard") but also the degree of potential harm
or loss ("vulnerability"). In the next section I will explain how a long history
of political and economic marginalization of the majority of Salvadorans has resulted in
elevated vulnerability.(4)
Every year there are a large number of small and medium sized events (landslides, floods,
drought, wildfires, outbreaks of disease) that are localized and affect smaller number of
people. They don't make headlines or elicit international relief, but cumulatively they
may account for similar or greater levels of social and economic loss than less frequent
large scale events (Lavell, 1994: 50). This is not surprising given El Salvador's degree
of hazardousness and the high degree of vulnerability of most of the population (or, the
other way around: their low degree of capability to cope with hazard impacts).
Political Ecology of El Salvador and the Roots of Disaster Vulnerability
For more than one hundred years, El Salvador's main export was coffee. In 1881, president
Zaldivar expropriated communal lands so that a small group of elite coffee producers could
expand their holdings. Ever since the poor majority has been scratching out a living on
tiny plots (microfundia) while selling their labor to the coffee barons. The alternatives
were migration to the capital city of San Salvador to find work, migration abroad (there
are now at least 750,000 Salvadorans in the U.S. (5)), or
starvation.
Such artificially imposed human hunger, land shortage, and monocropping have produced the
worst deforestation and land degradation in Central America. At the beginning of the civil
war, in 1980, El Salvador had a population density of 565 persons per square mile, more
than ten times higher than Nicaragua and five times higher than Costa Rica. At that time
76% of rural dwellers were classified as living in poverty, and 55% in "extreme
poverty" (Weaver, 1994: 162-3).
During the late 1970s and early 1980s just one per cent of the farms comprised 76% of the
farmland in El Salvador; while 41% of the farms were so tiny that they comprised only ten
per cent (Barry, 1990: 80). In terms of income distribution, the richest 20% obtained 66%
of the income; while the poorest 20% earned only 2% (Barry, 1987: 14).
Faber (1993: 61) describes both the expansion of large scale agriculture and the pressure
on the rural areas:
... [C]apitalist export agriculture expanded into the volcanic
highlands, interior
valleys, and Pacific coastal plain, resulting in the near-complete
dispossession
of the peasantry. In the mid-1960s, 97 percent of the agricultural work
force
were employed during the export harvests. During the off-seasons,
employment
dropped to 32 percent of the available labor force. Up to one-tenth of
the pickers
for Guatemala's cotton crop were impoverished Salvadoran peasants,
while tens
of thousands of others migrated to work the export harvests in
Nicaragua and
Honduras.
Grossly inequitable land ownership and skewed income has repeatedly lead to rebellions,
and finally to a 12 year civil war (1980-92) that took it's own toll on the environment,
in addition to taking 75,000 lives.
Such inequities had led to uprisings and rebellions before. In 1932, Augustin Farabundo
Marti led an uprising that was countered so forcefully that 30,000 peasants were killed in
what is still remembered as La Matanza (The Massacre). During the most recent civil war of
1980-92, heavy aerial bombardment and the use of napalm caused heavy ecological damage,
including deforestation in the more remote, mountainous cloud forest and volcanic areas.
This, in turn, has contributed to exaggerated cycles of drought and flood, as well as to
an increase in the number of landslides (Faber, 1993: 204-7; Comfort et al., 2000).
The Root Causes of Vulnerability
The roots of disaster vulnerability in El Salvador lie, therefore, in a long history of
elite control of land and the wars that have resulted. These two fundamental historical
factors have shaped the country's population distribution and settlement pattern, one
which exposes two groups to very high risk: the urban poor, especially those living in and
near the ravines (quebradas) that are common in the greater San Salvador metropolitan
region, and the rural poor who live on steep slopes or near rivers, and also others living
in drought prone areas. Destructive landslides and floods were common during the El Niño
rains of 1988 and hurricane Mitch in 1998. During the recent earthquakes, a landslide in
the Cordillera del Bálsamo buried 500 houses and killed 700 people in part of greater San
Salvador known as Santa Tecla (Faber, 2001: 1). Landslides also blocked the Pan American
highway in two places, and there was a large landslide south of Lake Ilopango, as well as
smaller landslides (Lomnitz and Elizararras, 2001). The Government of El Salvador
estimates that there were 645 landslides in total associated with these earthquakes (GOES,
2001).
The Lessons of Hurricane Mitch
Progress, far from
consisting in change, depends on
retentiveness... Those
who cannot remember the past
are condemned to repeat
it.
- George Santayana, Life of Reason
El Salvador's Missed Opportunity
El Salvador was in a perfect situation to learn a great deal from hurricane Mitch and
benefit from the large amount of technical advice and financial assistance provided to the
affected countries. This is because it actually suffered relatively light damage, yet it
was a full participant in all the meetings and process of drawing out lessons and planning
to prevent disasters. (6)
Of the official total of 21,116 dead and missing in Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El
Salvador, only 260 of these deaths were in El Salvador (1%). El Salvador also had only one
per cent of the injured, and its share of those evacuated and sheltered were 6% and 12%,
respectively. In addition, El Salvador only lost around 10,000 homes of the total
residential loss of 124,068 (8%) (IFRC, 1999).
El Salvador was in a much better position to implement new systems and approaches to
prevention and mitigation because its damages had been relatively light. Therefore in the
next section I am going to look at the discourse put forth by the government that appears
to indicate that they learned lessons from Mitch, but I will then review actual practice
and reflect on why the lessons learned were not actually implemented. In doing so, I
readily acknowledge two methodological problems. First there is the matter of time scale.
Some might think that the two years' time between hurricane Mitch and the earthquakes of
2001 is too short a period during which to expect major changes in government policy,
especially when one considers that there has been a change in government also during these
years. To these potential critics I say that much the same general lessons concerning
mitigation and prevention and much the same rhetorical acceptance by governments have
occurred again and again during the past few decades. One could, for example, go back to
plans and programs never implemented following the earthquake of 1986. Furthermore,
although there was a change in national government, the ruling party remained the same.
The second methodological doubt might focus on the difference in hazard event. Can there
really be lessons from a hurricane that are applicable to mitigation of losses from an
earthquake? The answer to this is easier. If the International Decade for Natural Disaster
Reduction obtained an worldwide consensus on anything, it was that (a) disaster prevention
and mitigation must be "mainstreamed", that is, integrated into a wide range of
"normal" policy decisions that affect governance, social welfare,
infrastructure, and economic planning, and that (b) such policies and national/ local
institutions supporting them should be oriented toward multiple hazards, not a single kind
of extreme event.
Therefore, in the context of El Salvador, one is justified in comparing national
government rhetoric and paper plans with the reality of trends in the "normal"
policy realm just mentioned. I do this by considering official government analysis and
discussion of the "lessons" learned from hurricane Mitch and also a detailed
inspection of the official recovery budget prepared by the Government of El Salvador.
Specific Lessons and Commitments
The declaration signed by post Mitch recipients and donors in Stockholm in 1999 called for
partnership to (UNDP, 1999):
* Reduce the social and ecological vulnerability of
the region;
* Reconstruct and transform Central America on the
basis of transparency and good
governance;
* Consolidate democracy and good governance,
reinforcing the decentralization of
governmental functions and powers, with the active participation of civil society;
* Promote respect for human rights, including equality
between women and men, and the
rights of children, ethnic groups and other minorities;
* Coordinate donor efforts, guided by priorities set
by the recipient countries.
* Intensify efforts to reduce the external debt
carried by countries of the region.
The analysis that underlies these general principles,
agreed to by all the parties, donors and Central American governments alike, was based on
some concrete lessons concerning disaster vulnerability and hazard mitigation taught by
hurricane Mitch.
Social Development as Vulnerability Reduction
The government of El Salvador seems to have recognized lessons about the importance of
public health and access to health care as a way of reducing vulnerability to events like
hurricane Mitch (GOES, 1999).
"With the subject of public health, [Mitch] has
revealed the greater vulnerability in the
rural and urban marginal areas in terms of water-related diseases and lack of sewage:
cholera, transmissible diseases and in general in the lack of access to primary health and
hospital services.
It's analysis also highlights, "an
epidemiological situation characterized by infectious/contagious diseases linked to the
water and endemic malnutrition that are activated when an extreme environmental situation
is added to normal conditions of insufficient habitat and lack of sufficient
services" (GOES, 1999). It continues:
"The modernization of the Health Sector and the
necessities for changes are not facilitated
by the existing framework that establishes a health system structure in need of
modification
with regard to the responsibilities of various institutions that must redefine their
mission to
meet the health challenges of the next millennium."
In reality little has been done to restructure,
reorient, and better finance the health sector in the years since hurricane Mitch. On the
contrary, during 2000 there were protests by health care workers as well as consumers who
believed that the government was not committed to public sector health care, and wanted to
privatize all health services in the country. (7) Words such
as "restructure" and "reorient" could well be code for such
privatization, especially in light of passage of a law privatizing water supply. In a
country with such a high proportion of low income citizens, it is hard to imagine that
privatization of health care and water supply would have the effect of increasing access
to such services, thus reducing vulnerability.
In addition, despite such rhetorical commitment to health care system capable of
responding to extreme events, in the aftermath of the 13 January 2001 earthquake El
Salvador had lost use of 39% of its hospital beds (PAHO, 2001). The engineering necessary
to protect hospitals and non-structural measures as well have been well known and widely
disseminated by the Pan American Health Organization since the Mexico City earthquake in
1985. (8)
Poverty Reduction and Livelihood Security as Vulnerability Reduction
Some root causes of vulnerability seemed apparent to El Salvador's central government in
1999. It lamented the existence of a "[d]epressed family and rural economy blocked
not only by a deficient infrastructure network and lack of production services but also
limited by fragmented and oligopsonistic markets [control by a few buyers of markets for
rural goods]. It also faults "[a] financial structure insufficiently developed at the
local level to respond to the requirements of the small farmers" (GOES, 1999).
However little has been done since Mitch to stem the rural crisis that continues to drive
farmers off the land in search of employment in neighboring countries, in the U.S., or in
San Salvador. Indeed, the land reform (9) that was designed
to provide rural livelihoods for ex-combatants from both sides of the civil war, and which
was a critical part of the peace agreement, has never been fully implemented. Secondly,
any efforts to priorities the needs of small producers in rural El Salvador would have to
reverse years of extreme neglect. For example, between 1990-98, only 10% of credit went to
agricultural and livestock production. Of this, 79% of production credit went to coffee
producers. Only 2% of agricultural credit went to those producing food. (Flores, 2000).
Thus putting into practice the lessons of hurricane Mitch concerning sustainable
livelihood security would have required a sea change in government policy, which was not
forthcoming.
Structural Mitigation and Emergency Preparedness
Another lesson of Mitch was the need to improve the quality and location of homes in order
to address "a deficit of adequate housing for healthy family life in addition to the
concentration of fragile housing under high-risk environmental conditions" (GOES,
1999). Given the highly politicized and controversial nature of land tenure in El
Salvador, little was done in the post-Mitch period to resettle vulnerable people in safer
locations. Emphasis was laid, instead, on building new dams and levies, and on attempts to
develop flood warning and evacuation systems.
The problem of poor housing quality in dangerous locations persists. Indeed, some
"temporary" housing built following the flooding in 1998 had become
"permanent" by 2001 and collapsed in the earthquakes. A more systematic review
of housing policy and construction norms might have been the result of generalizing the
"lessons" of hurricane Mitch, had there been political will. Housing stock in El
Salvador is generally poor and thus vulnerable to damage from many kinds of events: flood,
landslide, seismic shaking, liquefaction, and high wind. By contrast to official policy in
El Salvador, Costa Rica had legally banned the use of non-reinforced adobe or bamboo
residential construction by the 1930s.
In 1999, the El Salvador government acknowledged "[t]he need to strengthen a modern
national system for prevention and immediate response to disasters based on an adequate
cooperation between the local and central levels" (GOES, 1999). However, the majority
party in that government did not allow a draft law (10) to
pass the National Assembly that would have established precisely such a "modern
national system for prevention and immediate response." As a result the country has
retained its National Emergency Committee (COEN) that is only focused on response, not
prevention. In addition, although theoretically a national "system" in the sense
of cooperation among numerous institutions and levels of government, COEN has remained
centralized, and in the view of opposition political parties, many municipal mayors, and
much of civil society, a closed "club" used for distributing relief aid among
supporters of the ruling party, ARENA.
Environmental Management as Disaster Mitigation and Prevention
Prominent among causes of vulnerability to disaster identified in 1999 was "[a]
damaged environment caused by the improper utilization of the watershed slopes
incompatible with the sustainable use of the soil and forestry resources" (GOES,
1999). If only this lesson had been learned from hurricane Mitch, many of the landslides
that followed the earthquakes in 2001 might have been prevented.
El Salvador's Neoliberal State
To understand why the lessons of Mitch were not internalized by the central government in
El Salvador and its permanent state apparatus and translated into action, one must
understand the current government as a reflection of a neoliberal state with a particular
history.
Increasing violence and unrest in the countryside cut coffee exports by 50% during the
1970s. A century of coffee's dominance as the major export was ending. Although
agricultural exports remained, and are still, important (coffee, followed by shrimp,
sugar, and cotton, in that order (Barry, 1990: 80), the political and economic elite
turned more and more toward utilizing cheap labor in textile and other export enclaves.
Buying in early to this aspect of globalization, a series of governments from the 1980s
onwards were amenable to World Bank and IMF structural adjustment plans.
These are core elements of the neoliberal world view that has come to dominate the
government and most of the permanent bureaucracy in El Salvador: free trade, openness to
foreign investment, fiscal discipline, privatization of government function, down-sizing
of government, decentralization of remaining government functions (usually with little
resources provided), and, to cap it all, dollarization of the national economy. Underlying
these specific policies and macro economic measures, neoliberalism the world over shares a
faith that opening up the country to business interests, without any regulation geared
towards protecting the most vulnerable and ensuring that basic services and access to
opportunities are guaranteed to all, will take care of poverty and develop the country. I
refer a set of public policies based on such a faith a neoliberal development model, to
which I will return below.
From 1992, during the period of economic, political/institutional, and social recovery
following the twelve year civil war, these neoliberal principles were reinforced by
international financial institutions (IFIs), sometimes undermining programs put in motion
by other agencies in the United Nations system such as land acquisition for the
re-settlement of former combatants mentioned earlier (Boyce and Pastor, 1997), as well as
providing loans for such things as the recent privatization of the nation's water supply
system.
The Neoliberal State's Plan for Recovery from the Earthquakes
What the government of El Salvador presented in Madrid at a meeting of donors on March
7th, 2001, was a series of projects totaling around $1.46 billion (GOES, 2001). Half of
this amount would be allocated to reconstruction and repair of housing, public buildings,
roads and transportation infrastructure, and telecommunications. Of course such basic
facilities and infrastructure must be rebuilt. The question is whether the other half of
the money would be spent in ways that reduce social and economic vulnerability by, for
example, providing better access to health care, water and sanitation, or sustainable
livelihood security. How much of this planned expenditure can be expected to reduce
vulnerability? How much is likely to result in the mitigation of hazard? And how much
would enhance environmental management? (11) In the following
sections I put the government's earthquake recovery plan under a microscope and try to
answer these questions.
Reducing Social Vulnerability
Some of the expenditure on health care facilities could possibly provide additional or
enhanced health care for people who need it. However the impact of expenditure in the
health sector will depend largely on whether privatization will negate any gains in access
to service created. In the water supply and sanitation sector, where $29 million would be
spent, there also may be some additional or more reliable access to safe water supplies
and sanitation. How privatization is implemented will decide whether improved and more
reliable water supply will "trickle down" to the more than half million
households (41%) who the government classified in 1999 as "poor", much less the
232,000 households who lived on less than one U.S. dollar a day in urban areas or, in the
countryside, on less than U.S. 67 cents (DGEC, 2000).
Sustainable Livelihood Security
$292 million dollars would be provided in the plan for rural activities and agriculture.
Some of this is for irrigation facilities, but other programs such as "Reconstruction
for a New Rural World" involves "modernizing" the small farm sector through
technology transfer, crop diversification, marketing, etc. Here is where the limits of the
neoliberal model are most evident. This country has had a long violent history of
struggles over land. The underlying skewed distribution of access to land has not yet been
reformed. Without land reform there is little chance that these classic top-down,
betterment schemes will secure livelihoods, thus reducing vulnerability. In addition,
given the history of meager provision of credit to agriculture described earlier, nothing
short of a complete overhaul of the commercial credit system would be required. At first
sight, the $292 million budgeted for "rural activities" seems substantial. That
amount of investment in rural El Salvador would more than double the $256 million that
went to agriculture from 1990-98. However, one must recall that all but 2% of that earlier
investment went to coffee (79%) and other export crops (Flores, 2000). Thus major infusion
of support for marginal rural livelihoods would require a complete change in priorities.
Hazard and Risk Mitigation
A large proportion of the money budgeted for the health sector and schools goes for
reconstruction. So if one assumes that all this activity will include strengthening and
retrofitting structures, then a large part of the total of $81 million and $55 million,
respectively could be expected to provide hazard mitigation. (12)
There also appears a very large project for $205 million to build physical controls on the
Rio Grande de San Miguel, and another $54 million are allocated to soil and slope
stabilization.
Some items in the plan are conspicuous by their small dollar allocations. For example,
only $400,000 is supposed to provide the education sector with systems to identify the
most vulnerable school buildings, improve building and maintenance manuals and procedures.
As more than 1,500 schools were damaged, this sum seems rather small. Likewise one million
dollars for the entire health sector to develop a disaster preparedness system is only
barely adequate.
Money is also allocated to a satellite based system for tracking fishing vessels and
warning them of storms, and $8.5 million would enhance seismic, volcanological, and
hydrometeorological monitoring and forecasting.
Environmental Management
At the very end of the 37 page list of projects come a few items that directly concern
environmental management. Development of a strategy for river basin management would cost
$12 million. Projects to assist regeneration and restoration of natural areas are
allocated $30 million, and $3 million would go for preservation of forest soils. $3
million is set aside for projects that would provide incentives for rural people to
maintain landscapes that provide environmental services such as percolation of water into
the soil and biodiversity. (13)
The reader will be forgiven if she finds this total of $48 million (3% of the total
planned expenditure) to be little more than a token gesture. There is a widespread
consensus in Central America, and the world, that disaster prevention cannot be achieved
without adequate attention to the use of water, land, and natural vegetation (Girot, 2000;
Gamarra et al., 2000). Given El Salvador's current state of environmental degradation,
shouldn't the plan allocate much more for primary earth care?
Glass Half Empty or Half Full?
Totaling up the items mentioned above, and making the optimistic assumptions discussed,
roughly half of the planned $1.46 billion could result in risk reduction through hazard
mitigation, improved environmental management, livelihood security, and improved social
service access. How likely is this to be the case?
The question is whether even if half this money were used to rebuilt the physical status
quo ante and the other half really were to spent as described, would the root causes of
vulnerability be changed? Earlier I showed that these root causes are inseparable from the
economic and political history of El Salvador. Land hunger and resulting misuse of land
give rise to both rural and urban marginalization, exposure to risks, and lack of
political and economic means for individuals or communities to reduce those risks. Nothing
in this plan questions or proposes a departure from the neoliberal model of
"development" in El Salvador that has produced such extreme disparities in
wealth (e.g. land) and income. On the contrary, the central government's belief in
neoliberalism is more likely to exacerbate these inequalities.
The central government's commitment to neoliberal ideology raises another question about
the recovery plan: who will implement it? Privatization of government functions has been
accelerating in El Salvador for several years. Can a shrunken state apparatus spend $1.46
billion? Will the state contract with Salvadoran NGOs that have been critical of
government and that it cannot control? Will it turn to foreign NGOs as vehicles for
implementation when some of them also criticize the government and are committed to
structural changes?
Or will it invite bids from international engineering firms and other transnational
corporations? This is a more likely scenario. International disaster relief and recovery
is a growth industry elsewhere in the world (large transnational corporations such as
Paris based Vivendi are involved) as is the privatization of public utilities - water,
power, health care. Such privatization is well established in El Salvador and could
expand.
Who Needs a Ministry of Public Works?
A good example of the central government's tenacious hold on its time table for
"modernization" (that is, privatization and government down-sizing) is its
reform of the Ministry of Public Works. In March, some 6,624 employees (around half) of
the Ministry were asked to leave at a cost of $4.25 million dollars in compensation
packages. The Ministry is to be turned into a coordinating and accounting agency to
oversee private contracts for all road and bridge maintenance and other public works. The
entire fleet of heavy machinery was idle as arrangements were made, first to turn it over
into the care of the Armed Forces, and then later to be sold to the private sector. (El
Diario de Hoy, 31 March, 2001).
All of this took place only a matter of weeks before the onset of the rainy season. A
large number of drainage works needed to be cleaned, rubble and debris removed, basic
sanitary provisions supplied to the many people still in shelters or "temporary"
housing. This is the minimum required to avoid additional public health, flood, and
landslide disasters. The central government itself knew this. The National Emergency
Committee (COEN) had identified at least 350 areas are vulnerable to flooding and
landslides in the rainy season that would begin during May (IFRC, 2001).
In anticipation of the rainy season some limited public works were underway in March, by
way of mitigation of these hazards, but not nearly enough. Meanwhile the Armed Forces made
a show of conducting "simulations" of flood evacuation and rescue. In other
words, the shift from response to prevention that post-Mitch documents praised was no
where evident. In fact, much greater attention was being paid to providing security and
safety (additional police, trained life guards, much public education) for the middle
class Salvadorans who would spend the Holy Week on holiday on the Pacific Coast.
While the middle class were away from San Salvador, the water company announced that this
would be a good time to cut off water to much of the metro area for three days. Of course,
the great majority of the 2 million residents in this primate city are working class and
poor. Although some low income urban residents travel to their rural birth places for the
festivities, most will be at home without water, and certainly not at the beach! Class
blindness and arrogance continue to poison the relations between the great majority of
people and such technical managers.
The "Development = Disaster Reduction" Cliché
Elsewhere in this volume Rocha and Christoplos criticize the twin blanket notions that
poverty and vulnerability are identical, and that an increase in development necessarily
brings disaster risk reduction. The case of El Salvador provides evidence that they are
justified in their criticism. The run-away capitalism justified by neoliberal ideology in
this country has produced vulnerabilities that affect all but the very richest. Those who
died under the landslide in Santa Tecla were lower middle class people, not the poorest of
the poor.
It is also obvious that whether development leads to disaster risk reduction depends on
what kind of "development". If it is exclusively "economic"
development (measured as growth in exports, for example, "planned" and guided by
the "invisible hand" of the market), then the consequence is likely to be
increased disaster risk. If it is "human" or "social" development
(with due attention to social development, increase of capabilities and freedom,
widespread livelihood security, and environmental enhancement), then the result can be
reduction of disaster risk This latter kind of development must, however, be guided by
participatory, democratic, citizen based planning and societal consensus on moral,
non-market values and goals (UNRISD, 2000; Sen, 2000; Platt, 1999).
Phantom Decentralization: Capacity Problems at Municipal Level
Unfunded Mandates
Neoliberal thought seized state power in the early 1980's, with the ascendency to national
leadership of Ronald Reagan in the U.S., Margaret Thatcher in U.K., and Helmut Kohl in
(then) West Germany. Soon municipal governments form Los Angeles, to Manchester, to
Cologne were complaining about "unfunded mandates," a form of decentralization
of central government responsibilities without funding or resources.
It is therefore not surprising that one finds the same thing going on in El Salvador,
beginning at the time of its civil war during 1980-1992. A total of $6 billion in military
aid poured in from the U.S., and with it great influence over the economic and political
philosophy of the conservative ARENA party, then, as now, the ruling party in El Salvador.
Again one finds a striking contrast between central government rhetoric and reality in the
issue of decentralization. In its description of its "Strategic Vision: the Local
Development Program (PDL)" (part of the post-Mitch recovery plan), the Government of
El Salvador says all the correct things (GOES, 1999):
"The Local Development Program is the strategic vision of efforts to overcome the
effects and
poverty caused by Mitch. Conceptually, it is a process to generate the capacity at the
municipal level and at the community to promote the economic, social and political growth
of
the population. This development is understood as a self-sustained, progressive and
equitable
process that also has aspects of gender and environment, based on the participation of
local
residents."
Lack of Municipal Capacity
In reality, two years later when the recent earthquakes struck, only a handful of the
country's 262 municipal governments had any professionally trained staff. One of the major
problems identified and addressed by some NGOs in El Salvador is the lack of municipal
capacity for planning, programming, budgeting, project management, negotiation with the
companies that are lined up to become private supplies of water, energy, road works, etc.,
and lack of capacity for litigation.
Legal capacity is very important. One of the reasons why there has been so much confusion
and delay in replacing the thousands of homes destroyed is that municipalities cannot find
land for permanent, secure, and healthy house sites. This is also the reason why so much
donor effort has gone into "temporary" housing, in sites that will become
unsanitary when the rains begin in May. The most common "temporary" house type
is a small box made of corrugated aluminum (lamina) for four walls and a roof. This
arrangement creates an oven during the day and a cold environment at night. It provides
little space for normal family functions, and, without latrines or drainage, densely
bunched on scarce public land, is a recipe for further health and social disasters.
The national government's commitment to defend private property makes it favor this kind
of ad hoc arrangement. Regrettably many foreign donors and NGOs have allowed themselves to
forget 20 years' experience that teaches that such temporary housing is a very bad idea. (14)
The municipalities could use their powers of "eminent domain", condemning and
expropriating land necessary for re-settlement (with negotiated compensation). The
Municipal Code gives them these powers. However, most municipalities do not have lawyers
familiar with this kind of law, nor have the courts seen many cases of this kind (the
municipalities of greater San Salvador are an exception). Finally, the municipal lawyers,
where they exist, may not have the skills to compete with private lawyers hired by
property owners. This could be one of the reasons why the municipality of Santa Tecla
failed to win its case against the developers whose new luxury home development in the Las
Colinas area quite likely contributed to the deadly landslide triggered by the January
13th earthquake.
A "Local Development Program"?
The governments strategy for reducing vulnerability through a "local development
program" bears quoting at length at this point. Had the following approach actually
been put in place, the losses due to the recent earthquakes are quite likely to have been
less, and, certainly the municipalities would be in a much stronger position at the moment
to address recovery as part of participatory, citizen based, comprehensive development
planning (GOES, 1999).
"The primary objective is the development of a progressive process for the
transference of
power, competence, responsibilities and resources from the central government to local
government in their role of politico-administrative units that form part of the national
judicial system and also represents the communities' interests. The following are the
specific
objectives:
"Create strengthen and consolidate local processes for the improvement of the
communities and municipal governments with the objective of promoting their own
development, mainly in two areas:
* organized and democratic participation of the civil society in processes of planning,
formulation, execution and operation of communal and municipal projects and,
*autonomy and capacity of management of the local development by the municipal
governments by means of a process of decentralization.
Provide the municipal and community infrastructure works aimed at the provision of
social services and support of the economic development (education, water, health,
rural roads, electrification, etc.)."
Since opposition parties are strong in many of the elected municipal councils, the ARENA
dominated national government simply does not wish to devolve power and capacity, although
it makes the appropriate sounds about decentralization to please the donors. In addition,
with privatization of public works and water underway, to be followed by others, this kind
of decentralization insures that private contractors (domestic and foreign) will win
contracts. The central government knows that most municipalities have no capacity whatever
to set up and to run their own utilities (water, power, etc.) or carry out road
maintenance and other public works. Giving them the responsibility without adequate human
and financial resources ensures that the work will be done by the private sector.
The Role of NGOs
There may be as many as 3,000 NGOs in El Salvador. They are diverse and include larger and
smaller, international INGOs, government sponsored or related GRINGOs, political party
dependent PONGOs, as well as more independent national or regional and municipal NGOs.
Some are church related, and some are not. Some take the form of think tanks, monitors of
human rights or the situation of particular groups such as women or the elderly; while
others provide specific services such as creation popular education material. (15) Other groups are not registered with the government as NGOs and
function more as social movements.
Since hurricane Mitch a variety of NGOs have been very active in calling attention to the
fact that the central government's actions were not living up to its commitments in the
Stockholm Declaration. They were instrumental in researching and promoting the
unsuccessful draft law on prevention of disasters. Several worked with communities
affected by hurricane Mitch, developing participatory planning methods as they did so, and
the result has been some successful models of low input sustainable agriculture and
aquaculture, as well as low cost models for wind and flood proofing rural houses.
After the recent earthquakes a large number of these groups have become active in
different parts of the country in recovery activities. Growing out of this experience, a
broad cross section of Salvadoran civil society developed a "Citizens' Declaration on
Reconstruction and Development of our Country." (16) The
signatories were more than a hundred very different kinds of NGOs and other groups,
associations, and organizations. This document pointed out that the government has not
implemented the commitments made in Stockholm to reduction of social and environmental
vulnerability, to decentralization, and to transparent governance and decision making. It
proposed three immediate priorities for recovery: housing, employment and livelihoods, and
reduction in social and environmental vulnerabilities. In this it is not far from the
spirit of the nominal allocations in the Madrid plan for earthquake recovery I discussed
earlier.
However where the "Citizen's Declaration" diverged from government plans in the
suggested manner of implementation. This cross section of civil society demanded
implementation "according to truly decentralized, participatory, and coordinated
schemes at national, regional, and local level; with a perspective that takes into account
social equality, gender, and environmental sustainability." (17)
They also demanded a process of preparing the plan to be presented at Madrid that would
include mayors, communities and the [earthquake] affected population, opposition political
parties, business people, and citizen based organizations." While at the last minute
the central government delegation invited the chair of the Corporation of Municipalities
of El Salvador (COMURES) and some other public intellectuals, the production of the plan
was not at all inclusive.
Finally, the "Citizen's Declaration" called for the establishment of a permanent
National Disaster Fund and the reintroduction and passage through the National Assembly of
a law that deals with disaster prevention, mitigation, and territorial planning.
Toward an Agenda for Action
Four priorities seem evident from the foregoing. First, greater unity or at least
coordination is needed among the institutions of civil society, and this includes NGOs.
Competition for foreign NGO and other donor support has led to lack of cooperation between
local NGOs where similar social and bio-regional concerns, not to mention propinquity,
would seem naturally to unite their efforts (e.g. on the left and right banks of the same
major river!). Similarly, as of the end of March, 2001, there were dozens of competing
designs for low cost replacement housing, not to mention three fundamentally different
re-housing philosophies emphasizing temporary, transitional, and permanent resettlement.
Second, there needs to be a concerted campaign to re-introduce and pass a basic law on
preparedness and prevention of disasters. A prerequisite for this is coordination, in not
unity, in civil society and a large scale popular education campaign. Without the
framework of law, there is no hope of improvements in disaster management at the national
level. The present system of ad hoc decisions by central government, lack of transparency,
and control of relief and foreign aid money by the ruling party will never result in a
national system of preparedness, and certainly not to the links between sustainable
livelihoods and ecologically sound land use that disaster mitigation and prevention
require.
Third, a national dialogue is required concerning the nature and trajectory of
"development" in El Salvador. What kind of economic, social, and environmental
policies are required to prevent disasters? What is the relationship between poverty
reduction and disaster reduction? How are disaster and democracy linked? As Rocha and
Christoplos show in their paper on Nicaragua, even under a conservative national
government this kind of national discussion is possible. Civil society and local NGOs must
take the lead. They have already made efforts, such as the proposal of a comprehensive
disaster prevention law after hurricane Mitch and by formulation of the "Citizen's
Declaration" on recovery from the recent earthquakes.
Fourth, the international solidarity network that existed during the civil war needs to be
reactivated. At that time there were many groups actively monitoring the human rights
situation, assisting political refugees, and lobbying with their governments for policies
that would lead to peace with justice in El Salvador. Since the peace agreement in 1992
this network has become less active. However, pressure on the national government in El
Salvador must come from outside as well as from within the country if the necessary
reforms are going to happen. I have argued elsewhere that there is a human right to
protection from avoidable harm in extreme natural events (Wisner, 2001). (18) Thus the same foreign groups that worked once in solidarity
with the people of El Salvador could help to monitor the degree to which their own
government policies and those of El Salvador provide protection from avoidable harm.
References Cited
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End.
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Hazards, People's Vulnerability, and Disasters, Routledge, London.
Bommer, Julian, "Terremotos, urbanizacion y riesgo sismico en San Salvador,"
Boletin PRISMA 18, Programa Salvadoreño de Investigación Sobre Desarrollo y Medio
Ambiente (PRISMA), San Salvador. http://www.prisma.org.sv/pubs/publicacion.php?idioma=es&ID=10
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Lynne Rienner, Boulder.
Cannon, Terry, 2000, "Vulnerability Analysis and Disasters," In: Parker, D.J.,
ed., Floods, Vol. 1, pp. 45-55, London, Routledge.
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Vulnerable Communities." Environmental Hazards 1, 1, pp. 39-44.
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Census, Government of El Salvador), 2000, Encuesta de Hogares y Propósitos Múltiples
(Household and Multiple Purpose Survey).
El Diario de Hoy, 2001, "Modernización acabo con el MOP," San Salvador, 31
March.
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May.
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America, Monthly Review, New York.
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Salvador." http://www.cispes.org/html/oped.html
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Gamarra, Luis, Gellert, Giesela, Morali, Mario, 2000, Guatemala: Hacia la Gestión de
Riesgos y Desastres en el Contexto de un Desarrollo Sostenible, Guatemala City, Movimiento
Tzukkun-Pop and others.
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Mesoamérica, San José, UICN/ IUSMA.
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"transforming the country to reduce vulnerabilities," ReliefWeb, 28 May 1999.
Government of El Salvador (GOES), 2001, Recovery plan from the damage caused by the
earthquakes of Jan 13th & Feb 13th, 2001, Government of El Salvador, Consultative
Group Meeting, Coordinated by the Inter-American Development Bank, Madrid, Spain, March 7
th, ReliefWeb, 7 March 2001.
Hewitt, Kenneth, 1996, Regions of Risk, London, Longman.
Ibarra, Angel, Campos, Ulises, and Pereira, David, 2000, Hacia una Gestión Ecológica de
los Riesgos, San Salvador, Lutheran World Federation and Unidad Ecológica Salvarore?a.
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), 1999,
"Central America: Hurricane Mitch operations Situation Report No. 1," ReliefWeb,
17 May 1999.
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), 2001, "El
Salvador: Earthquake Appeal No. 02/2001 Situation Report No. 12," ReliefWeb, 26 April
2001.
Lavell, Allan, 1994, "Prevention and Mitigation of Disasters in Central America:
Vulnerability to Disasters at the Local Level." In: Varley, A., ed., Disasters,
Development and Environment, pp. 49-64. Chichester, Wiley.
Lavell, Allan, 1998, "Un Encuentro con la Verdad: los Desastres en America Latina en
1998," Anuário Social y Político de America Latina 2, San José, FLACSO/ Nueva
Sociedad.
Lomnitz, Cinna and Elizararras, Sergio Rodriguez, 2001, "El Salvador 2001: Earthquake
disaster and disaster preparedness in a tropical volcanic environment." Seismological
Research Letters (forthcoming).
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Disasters: Prevention and Mitigation in the Americas 83 (April), p. S-3.
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Events, Island Press, Washington D.C.
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Unidad Ecológica Salvadoreña (UNES), 2000, Propuesta de Ley de Prevención y Mitigación
de Desastres, y de Protección Civil, San Salvador, UNES and Oxfam America.
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better future for hurricane victims," ReliefWeb, 7 Jun 1999.
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UNRISD, Geneva.
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Policy Role of Political Ecology in Mitigating Losses from Flood: a view from South Africa
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Annex I: Salvadoran Government Earthquake
Damage Statistics
Table No. 1. Damages caused by the earthquakes of the 13th January and 13th
February 2001 (GOES, 2001)
|
13th January |
13th February |
Total |
| Deaths |
844 |
315 |
1,159 |
| Wounded |
4,723 |
3,399 |
8,122 |
| Destroyed homes |
108,226 |
41,302 |
149,528 |
| Buried homes |
688 |
0 |
688 |
| Damaged homes |
169,632 |
15,706 |
185,338 |
| Victims of disaster |
1,160,316 |
372,603 |
1,532,919 |
| Public buildings damaged |
908 |
82 |
990 |
| Landslides |
574 |
71 |
645 |
| Damaged docks |
43 |
10 |
53 |
| Damaged churches |
344 |
73 |
417 |
| Hospitals |
18 |
5 |
23 |
| Health Units |
85 |
36 |
121 |
| Other health establishments |
11 |
0 |
11 |
| Affected schools |
1,366 |
200 |
1,566 |
Source: Survey by the General
Statistics Office of the Ministry of Economy and COEN.
End notes
1 I am grateful to Ian
Christoplos, who invited me to submit this paper to a theme issue of Disasters quite late
in the process of pulling it together. In the following I have had the benefit of
correspondence with him and try to address some of the observations he and Jose Luis Rocha
make concerning Nicaragua elsewhere in this volume, and also to detailed comments provided
from half a dozen colleagues with expertise in Central America. The opinions expressed are
mine alone, however, and certainly any mistakes.
2 Environmental Studies Program, Oberlin College, bwisner@igc.org .
3 Data on losses vary considerably. For example, the Economic
Commission for Latin America's estimate of total economic loss is closer to $1.5 billion,
and the count of homes destroyed has been as high as 300,000, depending on the source.
However, for the sake of consistency, I have chosen Government of El Salvador (GOES) data
throughout this paper. This estimates are likely to be on the low side.
4 Vulnerability can be loosely defined as "potential for
losses or other adverse impacts (Alexander, 2000: 12). However, Blaikie et al. see
vulnerability as reduced or inadequate ability "to anticipate, cope with, resist, and
recover from the impact of a natural hazard. It involves a combination of factors that
determine the degree to which someone's life and livelihood is put at risk by a discrete
and identifiable event in nature..." (1994: 9). Lavell (1994:52-61) distinguishes
among four interrelated kinds of vulnerability: economic, social, educational and
informational, and environmental. Cannon (2000: 47) identifies four "components of
vulnerability": initial well-being, livelihood resilience, self-protection, societal
protection, and social capital (social cohesion, rivalries, number and strength of
potentially conflicting or cooperating groups).
5 Estimate from U.S. Bureau of the Census (http://www.census.gov ) and Inter
American Development Bank studies of remittances of income from the U.S. (http://www.cepal.org.mx/ ).
International migrants from El Salvador remitted income in 1999 totaling nearly $1.6
billion, a sum that was twice the total of the country's agricultural exports, 6.5 times
the value of coffee exports, and seven times the earnings from tourism (El Siglo, 16 May,
2001).
6 This process of drawing out lessons and planning to use
them to prevent all future disasters (not just future hurricane disasters) was promoted
and sponsored by, among others, the Stockholm group of donors, the World Bank, the Inter
American Development Bank, CEPREDENAC (a regional coordinating body for disaster response
and prevention for Central America), and many NGOs, universities, and institutes from
around the region and the world.
7 At the moment, as in many Latin American countries, there
coexist a public (social security) health care system and a private system of hospitals
and clinics, as well as private health maintenance organizations with contracts with both
private industry and groups of public employees.
8 Numerous manuals, sets of guidelines, and training courses
have been provided over the years in the Latin American region by PAHO and by the PAHO/WHO
Collaborating Center on Disaster Mitigation in Health Facilities at the University of
Chile in Santiago (rborosch@tamarugo.cec.uchile.cl).
9 Plan de Transferencias de Tierras (PTT).
10 On the conceptual basis of such a new, comprehensive law,
see Ibarra et al. (2000), and for the text of the draft "Law on Prevention and
Mitigation of Disasters and Civil Protection", see UNES (2000).
11 Lavell (1998) asked a similar set of questions following
hurricane Mitch.
12 There is some overlap between the possible effects of some
of these projects. For example reinforcing dams (as proposed) under the "water and
sanitation" sector has already been included above as possibly leading to improved
and more reliable water supplies. It could also be counted as possibly contributing to
enhanced irrigation potential, or, indeed under "mitigation" if reinforcement
avoids future dam failures in an earthquake. Likewise, soil and slope stabilization
projects discussed later have both "environmental management" and "hazard
mitigation" functions, at least in theory.
13 In San Salvador I had conversations with several people
about turning some of the city's ravines into ecological parks. At the moment the ravines
are perceived negatively as hazards. The very poor who live in them could earn income to
use to move their homes out of danger if the city contracted with groups of residents in
these recognized "high risk" zones to convert and to maintain the ravine as an
ecological park. San Salvador has very little open space and few parks. On Sunday mornings
part of a major avenue is blocked to children can ride their bikes. Indeed, possibly
schools could establish contracts with ravine residents to maintain an ecological park as
an open air classroom for the study of biology and geology. Since many of these ravines
that link the city to flanks of the San Salvador volcano are very rich already in
biodiversity, this approach seems feasible. It would constitute an urban counterpart to
what the Madrid plan includes as incentives for rural people to maintain landscapes that
provide environmental services.
14 Some international NGOs and local NGOs have rejected the
"temporary" housing approach. They make the point that some of the houses that
collapsed during the earthquakes were poorly built "temporary" shelters put up
after hurricane Mitch. For example, Oxfam America is partnering with the local NGO, REDES,
to build concrete foundations and erect steel frames and roofing sufficient for 2,000
houses in San José Via Nueva, near San Salvador. Another example is Associación Equipo
Maiz, a group devoted to popular education. They partnered with the National University,
two other Salvadoran NGOs, and three foreign NGOs in researching and disseminating a model
low cost, self built reinforced adobe house that is resistant to seismic forces. Other
NGOs are now involved in building demonstration houses using this model in several parts
of the country.
15 For example, Equipo Maiz, mentioned above.
16 http://www.radixonline.org/elsalvador3.html
17 "...bajo esquemas verdaderamente descentralizados,
participativos y concertadores en el ámbito nacional, regional y local; con una
perspectiva de equidad social, de género y sustentabilidad ambiental... "
18 On the relationship between human rights and disasters,
see the web site RADIX: . http://www.radixonline.org
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