Carlos_Colarado

EL SALVADOR STRAINS TO RECOVER
FROM KILLER EARTHQUAKE

By Carlos X. Colorado in Los Angeles
Special for THE BLACKSTAR NEWS

SAN SALVADOR, EL SALV. -- While America ?transitions? to a new President, El Salvador transitions to a newreality. After being struck by a 7.9 Richter-scale earthquake last weekend, which the U.S. Embassy characterized as "shockingly strong," and
seismologists classed as one of the twenty strongest
in the world in the last hundred years, this tiniest
and most populous Central American nation is still
reeling, and rolling. Over 1,600 aftershocks have
reminded everyone why San Salvador is called "The
Valley of the Hammocks." Over 700 deaths (at press
time) have made the tragedy widespread, but one
neighborhood in particular, Las Colinas, buried under
a landslide after a hillside buckled under the intense
shaking, has typified the catastrophe.

One of the casualties there has personified the entire
tragedy. Sergio Moreno died on Wednesday, four
grueling days after being rescued. He was 22. A
keyboard player for a local pop group called Algod�n"
("Cotton"), Sergio became a symbol of hope and
survival for the entire, diminutive nation. Instead,
his death caused widespread grief, dread and despair.
Rather than survival against all odds, Sergio's story
seems to augur precarious prospects for El Salvador.
Sergio was discovered three hours after the quake
struck, pinned down under the collapsed balcony of a
house he was painting. He was found by the young man who was supposed to help him with the paint job, who arrived life-savingly late. However, he remainedunder the crushing weight of the broken building for thirty excruciating hours because in technologically underdeveloped El Salvador, no one could find a jack for some other devise to lift the walls off him.
Jos� Herrera was five blocks away from Sergio's
neighborhood when the quake hit. "What my eyes saw, had only been on television -- never in person," he recounts, shaken. "One could not keep one's footing.The earthquake forced those of us who kept our heads to throw ourselves on the ground. After 40 seconds that seemed like an eternity, I expected the ground to open up and swallow us," he says in the relative calm of retrospection. Of course, five blocks away from his location, the earth did swallow over two hundred souls -- a third of the casualties counted, so far(more are expected). "One sees the hillsides,

, but cannot distinguish the trails or paths," Jos� recalls,
describing the moment the quake struck. "During that
big whammy," he says, "one could see great clouds of
dust that leapt from the ground, indicating the dirt
paths up in the mountains."

The scene the moments after the earthquake was
chaotic. "Tears, sirens, and screams, everywhere,"
Jos� recalls. Somewhere among that bedlam, Sergio
Moreno lay pinned under a buckled wall, perhaps
knocked unconscious. When he was discovered, all that
suggested that he was still alive was that he wiggled
his finger. "You are the one who will see me die," he
told a nurse who kept him company, praying with him,
chatting, and singing to him while firemen struggled
mightily to lift the stones off him all through the
night, into the next day and evening while he was
sustained by an I.V. hook-up.

Sergio Moreno was mourned by Salvadorans all over the
world and buried by his home town, the port city of
Acajutla, awash in tears. But, Salvadorans won't have
much time for weeping. The week after the earthquake,
a cold front moved down from Mexico, adding to the
misery of 500,000 made homeless. Late in the week,
came the rain. "It rains over the rained-on," marvels
Jos� Herrera. In a plot twist that bordered on
surreal, U.S. volcanologists announced this week that
"the Colossus of the East," the Santa Ana Volcano, in
eastern El Salvador has increased its discharges of
gases and simmering embers. It last erupted in the
1920s, and the possibility of an eruption now
threatens some 40,000 nearby residents. The prospect
is deeply troubling and unthinkable.

For now, the daily routine of most Salvadorans
consists of assessing damage while trying to dodge
aftershocks. Marta Negrete works at a San Salvador
branch of Blockbuster Video, and she recently had a
close call. "We have a storage room in the second
floor of our store," she relates. The staircase
leading up to the storage room is in the back of the
store, at the opposite end of the front entrance --
the only form of egress. "I was taking some things
down from above, and it began to shake," she recalls.
"Whoaaaaa! My knees even buckled, and not from the
shaking," she states. "It was from fear, because the
exit was so far." The Blockbuster in Soyapango,
another town in San Salvador, she recounts, "was
reduced to bits."

Shockingly, many towns still have not received any
help. Comasagua, in the same province as the buried
as Colinas district, has been also hit hard, but
Salvadoran emergency officials have yet to set foot in
town. Mexican army soldiers distributing food have
bitterly complained of a lack of cooperation and
coordination among Salvadoran aid officials. Many of
the relief efforts mounted by Salvadorans abroad
circumvent the official government emergency
coordinating committee due to deep-seated distrust.
"They still subscribe to trickle-down economics," a
protestant pastor said to me in Los Angeles,
suggesting that corruption and bureaucratic
inefficiency would make the funds dwindle by the time
they reached the intended recipients. "During the
Hurricane Mitch relief operation [in 1998], the aid
distributed by the government was a pitance." This
time, a rag-tag band of Salvadoran exiles will use
churches to funnel funds down to the needy.