20 Years After Quake, Poor Still Live in Managua’s Ruins

Eva Maria Manzanares, her half-naked baby clutching her chest, cast a glance over the rubble-covered floor and cracked walls of the roofless building she calls home.

“Who would want to live here? This place is terrible,” said the unemployed mother of three. “We would like to have a little house--even one of cardboard.”

Manzanares’ home is the shell of a once-popular movie theater destroyed in a 1972 earthquake that laid waste to downtown Managua. Today, 20 years after the quake that changed the course of Nicaraguan political history, thousands of people like Manzanares live in the ruins of a city that was never rebuilt.

The squatters are not newcomers to what most agree is a miserable existence. Denis Manzanares, Eva Maria’s husband, has resided in the wrecked movie theater for 15 years, along with his mother and grandmother. Children have been born and reared in the ruins, where there is no running water, no electricity, no sewerage. And children die there, too, their little bodies falling victim to the diseases that breed readily.

Before the earthquake, downtown Managua was a thriving, bustling commercial hub. Today, still, it is a desolate and bizarre patchwork of vacant, weedy lots and the skeletons of dozens of buildings rendered useless by the quake but never demolished.

Two decades of tumultuous history have left Managua the way it is and have driven the most desperately poor to Managua’s ruins: two civil wars, the corruption of the Somoza dynasty’s dictatorship, mismanagement by the Sandinista government that followed and the chaos of today’s cash-strapped democratic Nicaraguan government.

Julia Rodriguez Pena moved into the battered hulk of downtown Managua’s Sofia Building, a five-story department store before the quake, after her husband was killed in 1979 defending the Somoza regime against Sandinista guerrillas.

She has lived there ever since with four of her grown children and a dozen grandchildren, most of whom are toddlers. The youngest, a tiny baby named Carmen dressed in yellow hand-me-downs, was born a few weeks ago.

“When the Sandinistas killed my husband (a member of the National Guard), they burned my house,” Rodriguez, 45, said. “They burned all my papers and all our clothes. I was left in the street.”

Rodriguez’s home has no real walls, just yawning gaps framed by peeled brick and exposed iron reinforcement bars that poke out dangerously. The air whistles through at night and water washes through with each rainfall.

For cooking their staple of rice and beans, the Rodriguez family uses makeshift, open stoves built of rock and blackened by soot. They share a common rustic toilet on the roof, and sleep on rags and discarded food sacks amid broken tiles and mounds of dirt.

They beg food from a local restaurant. The men of the family make a living hauling huge baskets of produce in the nearby Mercado Oriental (Eastern Market); the women and little girls earn a few cordobas by retrieving old clothing tossed from garbage trucks.

Rodriguez actually likes her home, largely because it allows her family to remain on the fringe of Nicaraguan society. The problem that obsesses her these days is the recent arrival of a family of Miskito Indians from the Caribbean coast. They are angry, violent people, Rodriguez claims, who have taken up residence on the ground floor and threatened the other squatters.

“We’re just here, waiting for God to help us,” Rodriguez said.

The earthquakes came in the middle of the night, in the wee morning hours of Dec. 23, 1972, just as Nicaraguans prepared to celebrate Christmas. About 10,000 people were killed by the temblor, and an estimated 80% of Managua’s buildings were destroyed or damaged.

The international community responded, sending money for relief. But then-President Anastasio Somoza blatantly misused these funds. Only about half of the $32 million in aid sent by Washington was ever accounted for, and Somoza is said to have profited enormously by buying land cheaply and then reselling it for development.

Such obvious corruption angered Nicaragua’s business class and helped to consolidate opposition to the dictator. Until the quake, opposition had been largely limited to a ragtag band of Sandinista rebels. Afterward, their outrage prompted many business and church leaders to abandon Somoza, and some aligned themselves with the Sandinistas.

Further eroding the dictator’s authority and encouraging his opponents, Somoza’s National Guard descended into anarchy in the days after the quake; many soldiers abandoned their posts to search for their families or to join--and even direct--widespread looting.

For the homeless poor, little changed. Money that was supposed to go toward housing for earthquake victims was squandered or reportedly ended up in the pockets of Somoza family members and National Guard officers.

The events were among the triggers of an insurrection that eventually saw Somoza’s downfall seven years later. But even after the Sandinistas toppled Somoza, seizing power in 1979, housing that did become available tended to be awarded to people on the basis of loyalty to the Sandinista party.

Through the 1980s, 10 years of war by U.S.-backed Contra rebels seeking to overthrow the Sandinistas drove thousands of Nicaraguans from the countryside and into Managua, exacerbating an already critical housing shortage. Entire communities of squatters in cardboard shacks have mushroomed throughout the city, even in the shadows of the downtown quake ruins.

Meanwhile, development that has gone on in recent years has been concentrated away from the old downtown, making Managua a widely dispersed city with no real center.

Part of the rationale is that central Managua sits on several faults that continue to pose a real seismic risk. The Tiscapa fault, which exploded in 1972, runs under home plate of the downtown national baseball stadium; another fault runs under the international airport.

Even amid clamor for quake-proof building standards--few currently exist--the new Casa del Gobierno presidential offices erected in the late 1980s by the Sandinista government were built near a fault line.

“If President (Violeta) Chamorro is in her office at the hour that an earthquake occurs, she would be in danger,” Fabio Segura, national seismology director, told a gathering of temblor specialists at a symposium last month.

Manzanares, the woman who lives in the remains of the Alcazar Movie Theater, gave birth to her three children there. Fellow ruin-dweller Elena Davila is a midwife and helped out with the deliveries.

The 22-year-old mother does not like having to bring up her children in those surroundings. Trash, drunks, insects, disease--such is the catalogue of problems.

Some squatters have received housing from Chamorro’s government. But this resettlement effort is minimal compared to the number of homeless, and it seems that each time one group is moved into stable shelter, more arrive, residents said.

“Two years ago, the mayor’s office promised us a home,” said Denis Manzanares, 28. “But they have forgotten about us. They only go around building parks. What good is a park to me? What we want is to have a real community, even as poor as we are.”

Around him, stray dogs wander by, and other inhabitants of the onetime theater are cooking vegetables on small campfires. They burn plastic bags instead of wood. It is cheaper, they say.

Maria Francisca Davila lost her home in the earthquake of 1972. Now, she sleeps in what was once the ticket booth of the theater, shuddering against nights full of fear and the sounds of bats.

“It is very insecure here,” she said, tending a fat black pig that shares her cramped living quarters. Her husband, a Somoza government official, was sent to prison by the Sandinistas. He was released from jail long ago but ran off with another woman, Davila says.

“I do not have anywhere to go. I do not have a home. I do not have work. I do not have (other) family,” Davila, 55, said. Occasionally, she earns a little money ironing clothes.

Her 15-year-old son, Francisco Javier, sells chewing gum on street corners to help out, but he has been sick lately.

“It is very ugly here,” Francisco Javier said of the place where he lives. “This building could fall at any moment.”

“We live here out of necessity,” the boy’s mother said.