El Salvador Consulate Here Besieged for Word on Fate of Quake Victims

In the frenzied El Salvador consulate in Los Angeles, Sandra Carranza sat at a table Saturday and quietly typed the names of people seeking information about their relatives back home, where an earthquake had crumpled the buildings of San Salvador.

One of the names was hers. “I’m trying to be calm, but it’s hard,” said Carraza, 25, who volunteered for duty after hearing about Friday’s earthquake. “This is driving me crazy.”

Carraza, a student, left her parents, two brothers and a sister behind when she came here five years ago. And like the hundreds who streamed into the tiny consulate on Saturday, Carraza was worried about her family and frustrated by the lack of information.

Consul General Ana Mendez said the temblor, measuring 5.4 on the Richter scale, knocked out most of the telephone lines in San Salvador. And once the magnitude of the disaster was clear, the consulate flung open its doors: Volunteers collected clothing, medicine, money, and--most often--names of the hundreds trying to find out about their relatives.

Working around the clock under a sign that listed office hours as 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 2 to 4 p.m., volunteers such as Blanca Avalos listened as tearful men and women asked about family members, and she answered with as much hope as she could.

‘Nothing to Tell Them’

“We would like to tell them something but there’s nothing to tell them,” she said.

Her own family is there too: brothers, sisters, grandparents. That is why she volunteered. “I have to do so something,” she said. “If I sit at home crying about it, I won’t be helping at all.”

Volunteers and staff members in Mendez’s office are working with the American Red Cross, local media outlets and other relief agencies, to collect information and channel aid to the stricken nation.

What is most urgently needed is money and medicine, said Benjamin Martinez, a print shop owner heading a volunteer Salvadoran merchants’ committee, as well as blood donations through the Red Cross. More than a ton of medical supplies was flown to San Salvador from Los Angeles on Saturday, he said.

“We want to encourage all people, especially Salvadorans, to contribute,” said consul Mendez.

‘Help Your Country!’

Hastily drawn signs--one of them reading “Salvadorans, help your country!”--directed anxious visitors to tables set up inside the wood-paneled consulate in a downtown office building.

One man stepped off the elevator clutching a wad of $1 bills. Women balanced boxes of clothing and blankets on their heads, and children slung plastic bags of clothes over their shoulders.

By nightfall, nearly $10,000 had been raised--most of it in small bills and small money orders, and volunteers like Regina Arce, sipping coffee from Red Cross paper cups, said “God bless you” to every donor.

Ana Bellosa had been saving all her pennies for “I don’t know what,” and on Saturday, she decided what. She lugged in a bagful of pennies, about $8 worth, and the 18-year-old assembly-line telephone inspector shoveled them into a slotted box for contributions of less than $5. Her grandparents live outside San Salvador and are fine. “Thank God,” she said, but “we’re all brothers.”

Southern California has the largest Salvadoran community in the United States, perhaps as many as 400,000. Most of them are war refugees, who have flooded into Southern California for the past six years, according to Roberto Alfaro, executive director of El Rescate, an agency that assists new arrivals from El Salvador. The largest single concentration of Salvadorans is in the Pico-Union area near downtown Los Angeles, and immigration officials estimate that more than 90% are illegal aliens.

U.S. Aid Dispatched

In Washington, M. Peter McPherson, director of the Agency for International Development, said the government rushed tents, blankets, cots, rolls of plastic sheeting, portable water tanks and other supplies to San Salvador. He said three specialized relief teams, equipped with jacks and torches to extricate trapped victims, were also sent, including one with dogs trained to sniff out people trapped under rubble.

McPherson urged individual Americans to refrain from sending relief packages to El Salvador because such gifts only clog supply channels and slow the delivery of more vital cargo.

Barbara Wilks, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County Red Cross, said thousands of dollars had already been donated to her office, in a relief effort she likened to the one that followed the earthquakes that hit Mexico City in September, 1985, killing about 10,000 people and causing $4.1 billion in damage.

More than a dozen area churches and businesses were collecting money and relief supplies. Father Luis Olivares, of Our Lady Queen of Angels Church, said donations would be forwarded directly to the Salvadoran archdiocese. At El Salvador Imports in Santa Ana, Flor de Maria Sandoval was collecting supplies to take to the consulate’s office in Los Angeles. And she, too, was working and worrying.

“I have family there. It’s very terrible,” she said. “We can’t get through now. I saw everything on the television last night. It was terrible.”

Times staff writers Norman Kempster, in Washington, and Roxana Kopetman, in Orange County, also contributed to this story.