Quake Deepens Plight of Salvador’s Poor

Before an earthquake convulsed San Salvador last week, much of the poverty of this capital was neatly camouflaged by tropical hillsides and steep canyons not easily seen from the streets above.

Few people knew or apparently cared to know how small the shanties were in the city’s slums and how many families lived within their fragile walls.

But the seismic jolt that brought down houses by the thousands has shaken the impoverished out of their hiding places onto street corners and highways of the capital.

“We have nothing now,” said Maria Pilar Campos, 48, a tortilla vendor who lost her mother, her home and her tortilla stove in last Friday’s earthquake.

Many of these newly homeless have long been short of food, clothing and better shelter, but now their needs are even greater--and immediate, amid afternoon rainstorms. The homeless say they are not getting enough help.

“We had to put ourselves in the street like a barricade to make the water truck stop,” said Campos’ neighbor on the smoggy street corner, Ana Gloria de Aguilar, 29.

In half a dozen neighborhoods hit by the earthquake, residents alternately complained that they were receiving water but no food, food but no medicine, or tents but no water. Some said they had received nothing.

“They say they are sending help from other countries, but they haven’t brought anything here,” said Maria Antonietta Rodriguez, 85.

“They say they are going to give, going to do, going to come, but nothing happens,” said Rodriguez, who sells cigarettes to earn a living.

Rodriguez is living in a cardboard tent on Venezuela Boulevard, which winds its way into the upper-class San Francisco neighborhood, where wealthy families live behind high walls. The residents of Venezuela Boulevard, in La Fortaleza neighborhood, have moved their makeshift houses into the middle of the street, closing off traffic and refusing to move when police urged them off the road.

President Jose Napoleon Duarte and the businessmen’s committee distributing international aid have said El Salvador has not received enough supplies to help all of the victims of last Friday’s earthquake, which registered 5.4 on the Richter scale.

Many in the capital are sleeping in the streets out of fear of returning to their homes, still being shaken by aftershocks.

“The first efforts were to rescue victims and then to coordinate the aid that began to arrive,” said Carlos Giron, a spokesman for the committee of businessmen coordinating aid. “There is not enough aid. The demands are enormous.”

U.S. sources aiding in the relief effort say the Salvadoran government suffered from initial problems of disorganization and bad management but said the problems were beginning to be resolved on Tuesday, five days after the earthquake.

Salvadoran soldiers, who had been used only to keep order, began taking census surveys Tuesday to coordinate delivery of aid.