Quake Puts New Pressures on Leaders : El Salvador Facing Political Aftershocks

When the mayor of San Salvador arrived at the government’s emergency command center one morning last week, he was surrounded by desperate men and women waving lists of their earthquake-stricken neighbors living in the street.

“You have to help us, we’re from your neighborhood,” cried an elderly woman. “No one wants to help us,” yelled another.

Mayor Jose Antonio Morales Erlich turned circles trying to escape the crowd that grabbed at his arms for attention. Suddenly overwhelmed, he shouted: “Senores, I am not Santa Claus!”

But the men and women were not asking for toys. They wanted food, clothes and drinking water, medicine for their children and plastic tarpaulins. They had been sleeping in the rain and were angry.

At least 31,000 families lost their homes in the strong Oct. 10 earthquake that seemed to target the capital’s poor neighborhoods. The disaster, which also brought down scores of public buildings, has put unprecedented demands on the U.S.-backed government and pressure on public figures like Morales Erlich.

U.S. and Salvadoran officials clearly are worried about political aftershocks of the earthquake, which has created a new class of homeless to add to the nearly 500,000 Salvadorans displaced by 6 1/2 years of guerrilla warfare in the countryside.

The Marxist-led insurgents fighting the Christian Democratic administration of President Jose Napoleon Duarte long ago announced a “prolonged popular war”--a strategy of economic sabotage and armed attacks to try to wear down the government and the U.S. determination to support it.

Now, with an estimated $2 billion in earthquake damage to the capital and the nation’s already ailing economy, Duarte told his Cabinet last week that he fears “a prolonged popular earthquake.”

“In 15 years, the guerrillas couldn’t have done this much damage,” a close adviser to Duarte said. “Now everything is ready for what they wanted.”

Several political observers said they do not believe the guerrillas are strong enough now to take advantage of the discontent and chaos caused by the earthquake. But civilian and military officials refer to earthquakes in Nicaragua and Mexico to emphasize that the political impact is not necessarily short-term.

Impact of Managua Quake

A 1972 earthquake in Managua destroyed much of the city and, by some accounts, helped to bring down dictator Anastasio Somoza seven years later, because his government was accused of stealing much of the international aid sent to Nicaragua and because it rebuilt practically nothing.

The Mexican government’s handling of an earthquake in Mexico City last year is reported to have eroded the image of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, which was seen as ineffective in responding to the victims.

El Salvador has been the Reagan Administration’s showpiece in counterinsurgency warfare. With $500 million a year and the permanent presence of U.S. military advisers, the United States has helped to turn around a war that the guerrillas nearly won in the early 1980s. U.S. officials obviously are determined not to let the natural disaster undo their success.

Shortly after the earthquake, U.S. Gen. John Galvin, head of the Southern Command in Panama, came here to survey the damage, and on Thursday, Secretary of State George P. Shultz arrived to describe $50 million in U.S. emergency aid as “a down payment” on future assistance. He brought with him the president of the Inter-American Development Bank.

The $50 million for El Salvador was substantially greater than the $1-million check that First Lady Nancy Reagan took to Mexico City right after its earthquake. A U.S. Embassy assessment of damage here explains why.

War and Reconstruction

“Just as the government is beginning . . . to try to project civilian authority in the countryside, earthquake damage--concentrated in metropolitan San Salvador--will claim a disproportionate share of the government’s resources,” the assessment says.

A harried U.S. Embassy official added, “We are aware there is a war here.”

Some political observers believe that one effect of the earthquake may be to further strengthen the hand of El Salvador’s powerful armed forces. The army now is distributing international donations of food in the capital through civic-military action, a role it usually plays only in the countryside in a campaign to win backing from the rural population.

No one foresees the earthquake leading to a military coup, but even before the earthquake, Duarte’s authority over the armed forces was weak.

Generally, in the first week after the earthquake, the Duarte government was disorganized and slow to distribute scarce aid to the victims, according to political observers and Salvadorans in need. One diplomat complained that the government had not even used a work crew he brought in to help with repairs.

Seeking Food, Cover

At the earthquake emergency center on Thursday--seven days after the earthquake--Danilo Martinez, 20, carried a list of 16 families from the Cuscatancingo neighborhood who, he said, had not received food, water or plastic tarpaulins.

“We went to the Red Cross and they sent us here to get authorization to get plastic covers. Here they said there isn’t anything, and that they could not help us. They told us to go look for our mayor. But our town hall has fallen down and I don’t know who the mayor is, but he’s not there,” Martinez said.

Duarte kept a high, caring profile during the week, touring damaged neighborhoods and appearing often on television, a role that initially helped to counter government inefficiency in some areas.

One way the government did respond quickly to the disaster was to restore basic services--electricity, water and telephones--to much of the city. War-seasoned technicians are experienced in repairing electricity and telephone systems that have been targets of the guerrillas for years.

Some Disputes Buried

For Duarte, the earthquake resolved some short-term political problems with the rightist business community, which opposed a so-called “war tax” just adopted by the Christian Democrat-dominated National Assembly and a military conscription measure proposed by Duarte to make the children of the well-to-do, as well as the poor, take up arms in the war.

Both controversies now have been buried by the earthquake. To draw the business sector into the emergency and avoid charges of government corruption, Duarte placed industry leaders in charge of the inventory of international aid coming into the country.

The earthquake also reduced the possibility that an internal political controversy would be generated by news that El Salvador’s Ilopango military air base was being used as a staging point for secret flights carrying military supplies to U.S.-backed rebels fighting the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. Trade unions and political organizations that might have launched protests about such activity are busy right now attending to problems caused by the quake.

A Political Opportunity

The earthquake gives Duarte an opportunity to recapture lost political ground among poor and working classes that was eroded by war and economic woes, if in the medium and longer run, he can show that his government is able to help them. To do that, he must get them out of the street and into new houses.

That’s not an easy task. Reconstruction will require money, the kind of efficiency and organization his government has not often shown, and new political confrontations with the ultraconservative business sector over such issues as land, construction jobs and prices.

Some estimates place the number of homeless families as high as 56,000.

Many of the poor who lost their housing were illegal squatters or were crowded into tenements sitting precariously on the sides of canyons. The government must decide where to put these people and who will pay for the land.

Duarte’s close advisers acknowledge that the government can expect international aid sources to provide only about 10% or 15% of the money needed to rebuild the capital, but they are hoping that a construction boom at least will provide short-term relief from unemployment and other economic problems.

Duarte said on national television last week that El Salvador already was “in crisis” before the earthquake. It seems inevitable that the social and political aftershocks will intensify that crisis.