Angry Earthquake Victims Loot Red Cross Center, Markets

Frustrated by a slow government food distribution effort, hundreds of hungry survivors of last week’s earthquake looted a central market and a Red Cross relief center in the battered provincial capital of Armenia on Friday.

Military police tried to halt a third day of pillaging with tear gas and live ammunition.

Photographers at the central market saw police fire over the heads of looters using cable-cutters, hammers and wooden clubs to try to break into shuttered stalls. At least two people were wounded, apparently by gunfire.

One of the looters, 45-year-old Heriberto Flores, passed out food and cleaning supplies to friends after being chased away by police.

“We’re hungry. I lost two kids and I have two more at home who have to eat,” he said.

Uptown, at the Red Cross center, scores of hungry homeless lost patience with eight-hour lines and bureaucracy and sacked the place. They had been waiting for their first rations and were forced to fill out forms and wait in two sets of lines.

Sixteen police officers stood by helplessly as people frantically carried off food, foam-rubber mattresses and tents to house the tens of thousands left homeless by Monday’s quake in the country’s mountainous central coffee-growing region. Some passed their plunder over a fence.

A television image showed one Red Cross worker seated on the warehouse’s second-floor weeping, his head in his hands, as looting went on beneath him. Several blocks away, military police arrived and were arresting looters.

Surveying what was left of the Red Cross’ makeshift storage facility, Luis Beleno, an agency official, said: “There’s a lot of desperation. But people are also taking advantage of the situation.”

“The quicker we get organized, the faster we will be able to work and distribute [the food], and the people themselves need to cooperate,” President Andres Pastrana told reporters before returning to Bogota for an emergency Cabinet meeting.

Meanwhile, international rescue teams were ordered to stop searching for possible survivors Friday, effectively sealing the fate of anyone still buried alive.

Spokesmen for the elite international teams said authorities had ordered a halt to their abortive efforts in a meeting early Friday, as bulldozers prepared to clear the city’s ruins.

“We are now demobilizing. Based on the inability to produce live finds it has been decided the search-and-rescue phase has ended. . . . All the international teams will be gone by Sunday,” said Ruben Almaguer, team leader with the 63-strong U.S. team from Metro Dade, Florida.

U.S. and French experts said the city’s unrest has severely hampered rescue operations or the chances of finding anyone alive. No one had been rescued alive in Armenia since Wednesday.

Colombia’s Pastrana sent 4,000 troops and imposed an overnight curfew in Armenia to crack down on looters who sacked dozens of markets and some homes after Monday’s quake in western Colombia.

Until the frustration boiled over Friday, the street patrols had restored calm to most areas of Armenia and surrounding towns.

Rescuers from as far away as Japan and Russia, meanwhile, continued to remove bodies as heavy machinery chipped away at mounds of debris, many several stories high.

The magnitude-6 quake killed at least 940 people and injured 3,690, the Red Cross said. Many more are missing, and 200,000 are homeless.

Air force planes delivered tons of water, food and medicine to the region, but a shortage of trucks and confusion among aid workers hampered delivery.

In Geneva, a spokeswoman for the U.N. World Food Program said it would begin distributing 200 tons of supplies on Friday. The agency also is joining UNICEF on Monday in distributing high-protein biscuits and milk to children.

UNICEF estimates 100,000 of the 200,000 homeless survivors are children.

Not only the homeless found themselves utterly dependent on relief. The quake destroyed hundreds of stores, businesses and banks, leaving thousands whose homes remained intact without money or jobs.

“There’s no money, there’s no banks, there’s nothing,” said a despondent Olinda Otalva, who waited hours in a food line outside a market last week, only to find the supplies had run out.

Lacking running water or toilets, public health was also becoming a serious concern. Some residents bathed in the filthy streets, where thousands have camped out since the quake.

Doctors reported small outbreaks of diarrhea and gastroenteritis and were watching for respiratory infections in a city choked with dust and the growing stench of decay. Clinics offered free tetanus shots.

“It’s not alarming yet, but it’s beginning,” said Jorge Raul Ossa, deputy director of medicine at Armenia’s San Juan de Dios Hospital.

Thousands of people formed blocks-long lines to receive their first fresh food since last Monday at markets and to get potable water from tank trucks.

At Armenia’s downtown Cristal Supermarket, owner Jose Rubiel Mejilla Rios decided to give away his food stocks rather than risk the alternative.

“We either give it away or they take it away,” Mejilla said.

Pastrana said that 290 tons of humanitarian aid had been sent to the region but that 150 more tons of food were needed daily.

“The food we’ve gotten is minuscule,” said John Mairo Cohecha, mayor of the neighboring town of Calarca, where thousands of poorly constructed and perilously placed residences were done in by the temblor.

Officials say about 3,000 homes were destroyed in Calarca, where the bulk of the buildings were erected in the 1960s and 1970s, long before Colombia had any meaningful rules about building in seismic areas.

Pastrana appealed for international help, including tents and tarps for the homeless. Residents whose homes survived were urged to take in refugees.