Churches work together to help Salvadoran quake victims

By Paul Jeffrey
Action by Churches Together (ACT)

San Salvador, El Salvador

The earth won’t stop shaking in El Salvador. One month after a devastating quake struck this Central American nation, a second major earthquake has killed hundreds more and left even more Salvadoran cities in ruins.

Following a 7.6-magnitude quake on January 13, Salvadorans had grown accustomed to aftershocks. There were more than 3,000 during the first month, seismologists reported, many too minor to notice, others of sufficient strength to send people running out of buildings.

Scientists haven’t decided whether the killer quake on February 13, a month to the day after January’s disaster, was an aftershock or a separate seismic event. The temblor, measured at 6.6 on the Richter scale, struck an area in eastern El Salvador relatively untouched by January’s disaster. While January’s quake was centered deep under the ocean off the country’s coast, the epicenter of the more recent quake was just 24 kilometers from San Salvador, close to where the provinces of La Paz and Cuscatlan share a border. It was also fatally shallow–only 14 kilometers under the surface.

While damage from January’s quake was widespread, most of the damage on February 13 was contained within a relatively small area. Yet destruction in the densely-populated region was severe. On February 15, government emergency officials put the death toll for the latest quake at 283, but acknowledged that scores more remain missing, many trapped in collapsed buildings or buried under hillsides that slid onto roads or fields. Access to several remote villages remained difficult. Officials said more than 2,500 people were injured, and 13,545 houses destroyed.

The latest tragedy brings the total death toll for the earthquake to more than 1118. Well over a million Salvadorans have been directly affected. Almost a quarter million houses have been destroyed or damaged since January 13.

Despite being worn down by a month of relief work, members of El Salvador’s Protestant churches responded quickly to the latest disaster. Within minutes, several Rapid Response Teams were in the field attending to the victims.

Separate teams were dispatched by the Salvadoran Lutheran Synod, Emmanuel Baptist Church, the Episcopal Church of El Salvador, the Reformed Church, and the Salvadoran office of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF). All these groups coordinate their relief work through ACT El Salvador, the local network of Action by Churches Together (ACT), a global alliance of church-based relief agencies.

ACT El Salvador also provided transportation and logistical support for a group of physicians and nurses from the University of El Salvador. And medical personnel and emergency vehicles from several members of ACT Nicaragua joined the relief effort on February 15.

According to Carlos Rauda, program director for the LWF in San Salvador, the church teams provided emergency attention and supplies to more than 15,000 people in the area affected by the February 13 earthquake. More than 200,000 people received assistance from ACT El Salvador in the aftermath of the January quake.

In late January, the ACT coordinating office in Geneva issued an appeal for US$3.9 million in support of relief work being carried out by ACT El Salvador. Rauda said the appeal would probably be increased following the recent earthquake. Only US$x.x million had been committed by February 15, according to ACT officials in Geneva.

The ACT network here takes advantage of the intimate knowledge that church workers possess of remote communities. “The churches know the reality of the people, especially the poor,” said Bishop Medardo Gomez of the Salvadoran Lutheran Synod. “And the churches are always there, part of the people in good times and in bad.”

According to Rudelmar Bueno de Faria, LWF country representative here and coordinator of ACT El Salvador, the churches offer a valuable model to the government in how to respond to disasters. “The government did not have networks established ahead of time, and it took them valuable time to establish alliances with different sectors of society in order to respond in affected communities,” Bueno de Faria said. “The disaster would have been much worse had other networks, especially those of the churches, not assumed a major role in responding quickly to the needs of the victims. The churches are the one organization that has historically been present in the most marginalized communities, in the zones of death. They have a strong commitment to serving the poorest of the poor, and they have what we call ‘installed capacity’, including ready volunteers who know the local community and are willing to work long hours in serving others. It’s not a surprise that in many communities the churches were the first to respond.”

This grassroots experience has been leveraged into even greater effectiveness through coordinated work with a variety of other agencies. ACT El Salvador also includes two secular members: the Salvadoran Ecological Unity (UES), a coalition of over 40 environmental groups that investigates ecological abuse and lobbies to protect the country’s beleaguered natural resources; and the Foundation for Studies on the Application of Rights (FESPADE), an organization providing legal assistance to victims.

ACT El Salvador has also worked closely with United Nations agencies and the World Food Program, and since well before the current emergency has coordinated a network of more than 50 international non-governmental organizations operating in the country. ACT El Salvador has collaborated on relief tasks with the government’s National Secretariate for the Family, and has conducted workshops for local mayors on organization and effective aid management. In many communities, ACT El Salvador has worked with Evangelical and Catholic congregations that are not formally part of the network, providing emergency food, clothing, medicines, and shelter materials, as well as sponsoring workshops in humanitarian response.

Quake increases political tensions

The cooperation among churches responding to the needs of El Salvador’s disaster victims is a welcome change from the political tensions generated by the earthquakes. El Salvador is a highly polarized country, and from the moment the ground stopped shaking on January 13, both the ruling Republican Nationalist Alliance (ARENA) and the opposition Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), have sought to take political advantage of the disaster.

Much of the debate has centered around how President Francisco Flores has managed the crisis. Just two days after the quake, Flores declared, “The worst is over.” He was wrong. His government’s inadequately prepared National Emergency Committee (COEN) quickly bungled the job of managing aid, so Flores turned the task over to a National Solidarity Commission (CONASOL) made up of bankers and top ruling party officials–the kind of people that the poor of El Salvador refer to as “the rich.” Flores named beer baron Roberto Murray Meza, ARENA’s de facto presidential candidate, to head the group.

Flores had hoped the business leaders on CONASOL would project an image of efficiency, transparency, and nonpartisanship. Yet the auxiliary Catholic bishop of San Salvador, Gregorio Rosa Chavez, observed that CONASOL seemed indistinguishable from the executive committee of ARENA. CONASOL’s alleged efficiency also unraveled when it set up a system that brought all arriving international aid to its headquarters in the capital, where it was inventoried and then turned over to COEN for dispatching to affected areas. Such bureaucratization slowed down the relief response, eventually forcing Flores to order relief supplies dispatched directly from the airport. After a week in which criticism of his management steadily increased, the president finally shifted coordination of the emergency response away from the central government and CONASOL and onto the country’s local mayors.

That decentralization, while moving decision-making closer to the scene of the disaster, also served to divert criticism away from the central government. Flores turned over sacks of money to several mayors to use in clearing away the rubble. Some of the money was supposed to be turned over directly to owners of destroyed houses. Yet as expectations arose among the survivors, it turned out the money wasn’t as much as many thought, and it was revealed that the president had taken the money from funds already destined for municipal governments under the existing budget.

“The government committed many errors. It was crazy to create committees composed of just party officials, millionaires, and private business people, but the government didn’t realize at first how big the problem was. The situation overcame them,” declared Bishop Gomez.

Some mayors refused to accept the assistance from Flores. At least three mayors aligned with ARENA close to instead work with ACT El Salvador in responding to the emergency in their municipalities.

Flores’ continued refusal to involve other sectors in managing the national response may cause him problems on March 7 when he makes a pitch for funding before international donors at a meeting of the Consultative Group in Madrid. Flores is under pressure both from civil society at home as well as from some European governments to take into consideration the ideas and plans of the country’s mayors, churches, and other civil society groups.

Many of those groups are urging Flores to postpone, if not outright cancel, the process of “dolarization” begun on January 1 when the U.S. dollar became legal tender here. At a moment when resources for reconstruction are in short supply, many believe the government–spending as much as one billion dollars on the conversion, much of it by using foreign reserves to buy up Salvador money still in circulation–could better use its scarce resources on rebuilding devastated areas.

Government planners are hoping that family remittances from Salvadorans abroad–amounting to US$1.75 billion last year–will help fuel rebuilding and help get the economy moving again. While the money will certainly help in some cases, analysts say remittances are more likely spent on household appliances and fast food, with little being invested in productive activity.

What seems certain is that life in rural towns devastated by the quakes is going to be more difficult. “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 liveable,” says Angel Ibarra, a physician who heads the UES. The agrarian system has collapsed. 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 U.S. 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.”