County Groups Mobilize Relief Aid for the Victims

Aid from Orange County to Mexico City’s earthquake victims Friday came in the form of donated dollars from charitable and Latino community organizations and plans by a medical aid group to fly doctors, nurses and medicine today to treat the city’s injured.

Liga International, a Santa Ana-based group that provides medical assistance to Mexico, will fly two planes carrying three doctors, two nurses, an emergency medical technician, an International Red Cross volunteer, medicine and supplies from Corona Airport to Mexico City this morning. Elizabeth Ross, the organization’s office manager, said the Red Cross volunteer will “ease our way” with Mexican authorities so the doctors from Liga--Spanish for “league”--can treat the injured.

Latino community leaders and relief organizations Friday asked the public to donate money for the earthquake victims; and at an afternoon news conference, Santa Ana Mayor Daniel E. Griset announced that the city will coordinate assistance efforts. The Hispanic Relations Office of the city had installed a hot line that residents could call to ask about the conditions in Mexico and how they could pledge support for the relief effort, the mayor said.

“This marks the start of our assistance,” Griset said. “At this point, we are dealing with partial information. But we simply need to prepare ourselves as Americans to help the people of Mexico City.”

Robert Miranda, a member of the board of directors of the United Way of Orange County, said the organization will commit up to $100,000 to the Red Cross for the Mexican earthquake relief. He said the commitment will be drawn from United Way’s emergency fund and special contributions.

A spokesman for Los Amigos, a downtown Santa Ana Latino business and professional organization, said in a telephone interview that the group had collected $7,000. At the press conference the Santiago Club, another business association, said it will donate $1,000, and the Orange County chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens pledged to collect funds.

The Diocese of Orange also will collect donations and pass them on to Catholic Relief Services, the national relief organization for the Bishops of the United States, a spokesman said.

Two other organizations, the Spanish weekly newspaper Miniondas and the Orange County branch of the Mexican-American Chamber of Commerce, are accepting donations to help the earthquake victims.

“The Mexican earthquake disaster touches many of our lives,” United Way’s Miranda said. “We know that many people who are listening right now have family and friends in the earthquake area.”

George Chitty, head of the Orange County chapter of the American Red Cross, said that only monetary donations were being gathered by the local organization because there still has not been a request for other supplies, especially medicine. He said the national office of the Red Cross had already sent 10 representatives and $250,000 in aid to Mexico City.

“We do not know what the official request, or need, is at this time so we are asking that people do not donate drugs or other medicines,” he said.

Alex Acevado, president of the Mexican-American Chamber of Commerce, said his organization has called on its 375 members for donations. He said the chamber is working with Channel 34, the Los Angeles-based Spanish television station, and may work with the other chambers in California.

Sejio Velasquez, editor of the weekly newspaper Miniondas, flew to Mexico City Thursday to find members of his family who live near the areas that were badly damaged and to determine where aid is needed, Latino community leaders said.

“We want the money to go to those hurt, those with no homes,” said Joe Elias, vice president of Los Amigos. “We want to give direct help to those most affected. You know as well as I do, if you go through a governmental agency in Mexico, it takes too much time.”

Liga spokeswoman Ross said nobody knows the exact method its team of doctors, nurses and volunteers will use to help the injured.

“Until they get there, they don’t know how they’ll do it,” she said, adding that they will work with the Red Cross to help determine where and how to set up. The Liga volunteers are going to the disaster area at personal risk to themselves, Ross said. “They’re going very casual and taking sleeping bags. . . . It won’t be easy.”

Jacki Hanson of Mission Viejo, one of the two nurses on the Liga team, said she won’t know what her duties will be until she gets to Mexico.

“It will be different,” she said. “I think it will be kind of a challenge. I’ve never done anything like that. Until I get there I don’t have any idea what I’ll be doing. From the little bit I read in the paper, I don’t know how many are injured, how it’s set up.”

She thinks she might be put in charge of “triage”--determining who is most badly injured and needs immediate treatment--”but I might wind up giving typhoid injections, whatever they want me to do,” she said.

Hanson, 52, worked nine years in a hospital and six years as a public health nurse among migrant laborers in the San Joaquin Valley before quitting nursing 13 years ago. She now manages a computer software store with her husband, although she flies with the Liga team to the Mexican state of Sinaloa, about 500 miles northwest of Mexico City, when the group sets up monthly clinics for poor residents.

As a public health nurse in the San Joaquin Valley she took care of 92 families, “and 90 spoke only Spanish,” she said. She manages to communicate with the Mexican residents she helps, but “my grammar, I’m sure, is atrocious,” she said.

She has been to Mexico City several times as a tourist. She said she is not worried about traveling to the damaged city now, although “I’m sure it will look different from the Mexico City I remember.”

Dr. John F. Bridgeman, past president of the Orange County Medical Assn. said the damage in Mexico City is out of the range of the planes flown by the Flying Samaritans, a group of local doctors --including Bridgeman--who set up weekend clinics for the poor in Baja California.

Besides, he said, making an impact on the magnitude of damage and injury in Mexico City would require “a very sophisticated approach, through the government or Red Cross or the military. Just a whole lot of good-hearted people going down there would be more sightseeing than anything,” he said.

The United States has emergency portable hospitals that can be loaded onto planes and set up to provide clinics, operating rooms, medicine and equipment, but “to make the system work, it would take the (Mexican) military or the government,” he said.

Miguel Pulido, owner of Ace Muffler shop in Santa Ana, said many of his relatives live in a neighborhood about three miles from Mexico City’s downtown area where the most damage was reported during Thursday morning’s earthquake. He said his family would contribute to the relief effort and that he would travel to the Mexican capital when it becomes feasible.

“At this point it is better to wait and find out how they are before I go,” Pulido said.

Tom Fuentes, spokesman for the Diocese of Orange and chairman of the Orange County Republican Party, said he was concerned about the disaster because he has cousins living in Mexico City. Calling the earthquake “a tragic and grave human crisis,” he said his family doesn’t live in the area affected but he is anxious to make telephone contact with them.

Other community leaders asked that local Latinos worried about their relatives in Mexico not fly to the area.

“We think we should all sit tight and refrain from getting in the way,” Linda Sullivan, past president of the Orange County chapter of the Mexican American Women’s National Assn., said in a telephone interview. Gasoline, food and shelter must be reserved for the earthquake victims, she said.

Times staff writer Dina Heredia contributed to this story.