‘Epicenter of Misery’ Losing Hope for Rescue From Effects of Quake : Costa Rica: The coastal province that suffered most in April’s temblor sees a return to the authorities’ old neglect now that banana exports are humming again.

In the days after a killer earthquake ripped up its southern Caribbean coastline, Costa Rica hurriedly repaired the docks that launch its most valuable export--bananas--to the rest of the world.

The 107-mile highway to San Jose, the highland capital, was bustling with commerce a week later, thanks to the prompt repair of four damaged bridges. The country’s sole oil refinery was pumping again, only briefly interrupted by a quake-induced fire.

But five times since the April 22 disaster, which cracked Limon’s aging underground mains, the city hospital has run out of water, pushing overworked doctors to the point of rebellion.

“The authorities have their priorities all wrong,” complained Dr. Roberto Cantillo Hernandez, who has worked much of the past month swatting flies drawn to the hospital by the stench of unwashed linens and unflushed toilets. “There is more to Limon than the bananas and the highway and the docks.”

A lingering water shortage in most of this ramshackle port city is a sign to many of its 60,000 residents that the rest of Costa Rica is again turning its back on their poverty now that their task of picking and moving bananas has resumed.

The quake, with a 7.4 magnitude, killed 62 people in Limon province, Costa Rica’s poorest, and 32 in neighboring Panama. It trashed dozens of towns, tore up roads, downed utility lines, ran off dollar-spending tourists and swept away acres of woods in mudslides above the coasts of both countries.

With emergency food donations now reaching the still-isolated hamlets south of Limon, the brunt of suffering in Costa Rica has fallen on the estimated 10,000 homeless, many of whom sleep in leaky tents, and on the slums that make up 18 of Limon’s 23 neighborhoods. There, with potable water supplies interrupted by quake damage, people have turned to polluted rivers or contaminated wells, ignoring official pleas to boil the water they drink.

“Every time they repair one leak (in the water system), they discover another one just down the pipe,” said Delroy Barton, secretary of the National Emergency Commission formed here to cope with the disaster.

At least 100 people, mostly children, turned up this week at the hospital with diarrhea, more than triple the pre-quake rate. Public schools remain closed for lack of water. Doctors fighting to control outbreaks of measles and malaria amid the mounting human waste are warning that cholera cannot be far behind.

“The quake has ripped open the body of Limon, exposing its cancer,” Jorge Rodriguez Araya, one of the city’s four representatives to the national Legislative Assembly, told visiting lawmakers from San Jose. Rumbo, a national news magazine, featured a cover story on Limon under the headline “Epicenter of Misery.”

Costa Rica’s Hispanic, coffee-growing ruling class long ignored the Afro-Caribbean settlers of Limon province’s tropical swamps. Political scientists suggest that the highlanders’ motive was to thwart the emergence of a powerful native banana-producing elite. For decades, San Jose left Limon’s development--its schools, housing and health care--in the hands of foreign banana companies.

Limon’s poverty deepened after a banana blight prompted foreign companies to leave in the 1930s and stay away until the 1970s. The few gains made since--a paved highway, drinkable water, even the 207-bed hospital--have resulted from mass citizen protests and general strikes. As the rest of Costa Rica prospered in the glow of President Oscar Arias Sanchez’s 1987 Nobel Peace Prize, Limon lagged behind--a Third World enclave in a nation with European living standards. Today it suffers more than triple the national rates of illiteracy, unemployment, malnutrition and drug addiction, while shouldering a new banana boom that earns 65% of the country’s export dollars.

Limon punished Arias’ National Liberation Party for its neglect by giving rival candidate Rafael Angel Calderon his widest vote margin in winning last year’s presidential election. After a year of unfulfilled promises by the Calderon administration, some Limon residents view the quake as a mixed blessing: a jolt that might unleash a flood of largess to develop the coast in earnest.

“This earthquake is the most powerful protest strike Limon has ever staged,” declared Walter Cespedes while driving through nearby Matina, where he is town manager. He said this with a mixture of hope for national pity and awe at the force that killed 20 townspeople in collapsed houses.

The quake, which occurred on Earth Day, confounded seismologists. It opened an unmapped fault in the Estrella Valley and pushed the coastline four feet higher than the sea, causing the water to recede permanently by about 100 yards and exposing coral to die in the sun.

Water oozed from sandy soil throughout the province, causing large chunks of earth to crack and sink. Bridges fell and one church was split down the center aisle. Limon’s customs house collapsed onto the furniture-for-export factory next door, throwing 450 artisans out of work. Two poorly built hotels in Limon, the Internacional and Las Olas, were destroyed.

The lush network of canals that took boatloads of visitors north from Limon to Tortuguero National Park partially dried up when the earth tilted, forcing Costa Rica Expeditions to suspend its popular Jungle Odyssey tour. The raised coral reefs at Puerto Viejo and Cahuita, south of Limon, destroyed their rating as internationally renowned places to surf.

Construction workers idled by thousands of aftershocks and children out of school comb the newly exposed sea bottom for gold rings and other jewelry lost by swimmers over the years. When the stench of dead fish and dying seaweed fades, Limon boosters say, the expanded beaches will attract larger crowds of tourists.

There are other optimistic predictions. Mayor Dagoberto Chavez Morales said he hopes that negotiations with San Jose to keep banana tax revenues in local hands will now succeed.

Miguel Angel Rodriguez, the Legislative Assembly president who toured Limon this month, said the national government will accelerate plans to build 3,700 sturdier houses in Limon and offer subsidies for people to rebuild in other towns. A project to create a free-port zone full of assembly plants will be stepped up, he said, and repairs of the water system will leave it better off than before.

Others doubt that the Calderon administration, which inherited a large fiscal deficit from Arias, can afford these projects. A $60-million emergency World Bank loan will barely cover the estimated cost of repairing roads, bridges, ports, schools and other infrastructure. Other damage--more than $30 million in lost exports, $500,000 a month in lost tourism and the $12-million cost of rebuilding all those houses--must be absorbed by the treasury.

Priests, community activists and residents ridicule the Emergency Commission’s assertion that most of the city has potable water now. Although the hospital’s water supply has been stable for the past week, Cantillo estimated that 60% of Limon’s residents are still without water.

“The water truck comes by every four or five days and, in between, we run out,” said Fernando Alvarez Valverde, 28, an idled bricklayer’s apprentice who is camped with his family and two others in a tent on a street of Limon’s seaside Christopher Columbus barrio. Their houses fell into a fetid swamp called the Limoncito River when the quake undermined its banks.

He and his wife resorted to a nearby well for their drinking water but stopped when their 13-month-old baby got diarrhea. Now they walk around with buckets on their heads collecting rainwater.

“If you listen to what the authorities say, you could be hopeful about the future of Limon,” said Abel Pacheco, a psychiatrist and author born here. “But if you see what has happened since the tragedy, you tend to be pessimistic.”