Mexico Sends 300 Soldiers to Quake Zone : Disaster: Troops under orders to tend injured, repair homes. Remote site causes confusion over toll.

The impoverished states at the epicenter of Thursday’s powerful earthquake were declared a disaster area Friday, and 300 soldiers were deployed to hardest-hit Guerrero and neighboring Oaxaca.

The troops, which include military doctors, are under orders to help the injured and rebuild the hundreds of homes, mainly adobe huts, that were destroyed or damaged in the 7.2-magnitude quake.

The army and state and local officials all provided conflicting reports about the extent of the damage, in part reflecting the difficulty of obtaining information from the remote areas where the quake was centered.

The army said Friday that the quake killed three people, injured five and displaced 113 to emergency shelters. A total of 111 houses were destroyed and 266 damaged, according to the military report. But the state government reported 800 houses damaged.

Ometepec County Deputy Mayor Carlos Pina said 8,000 people were left homeless in his county of Guerrero alone, at the quake’s epicenter. He estimated damages there at $383,000.

Pina said local officials asked Gov. Ruben Figueroa for 8,000 blankets and as many food packages, 350 tents, 4,000 temporary cardboard roofs and 75 tons of cement when the state leader visited Friday on a tour of the damaged area.

The quake is the second major blow this year to Figueroa, whose administration was already tottering after the federal human rights commission blamed his state government for a June massacre of 17 peasants farther up the coast. While accepting the army’s help, Figueroa has downplayed the effects of the quake.

He denied widely published reports that four people died under tumbling walls and said that 800 homes were destroyed or damaged statewide, despite reports from local officials that claim far more serious effects.

“Only one youth was killed,” Figueroa said in a national radio broadcast Friday morning. By afternoon, his office confirmed a second death.

Few serious injuries were reported as a result of the quake.

“Effectively, there were no grave cases to lament,” said Dr. Saul Alarcon, a Health Ministry official in Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero. “In Ometepec, there is only one person in the hospital.”

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The Mexican army, often called in to assist after natural disasters, began restoring electrical service Friday. Troops were sent out to search for areas that needed help.

The region most affected by the quake is a mountainous area of rutted, dirt roads connecting remote villages, although it also includes the international resort city of Acapulco. The area’s mainly Indian residents have a deep distrust of outsiders, especially soldiers, which makes them reluctant to provide information to strangers.

This week’s earthquake was about one-tenth as strong as the tremor that killed at least 10,000 people in Mexico City a decade ago.

In the capital Friday, residents began celebrating Independence Day, amazed that the capital had escaped nearly unscathed from the tremor. Alarms that announced the quake on Thursday were replaced Friday with blaring plastic horns.

Memories of the Sept. 19, 1985, quake had sobered many motorists stuck on overpasses or pedestrians watching skyscrapers sway Thursday morning. But by Friday, drivers were hanging Mexican flags from car windows and celebrants getting an early start were painting their faces red, white and green, the colors of the flag.