Salvadoran Town Feels Lost Amid Clamor for Aid

San Agustin survived war, hurricane and poverty. But not the earthquake.

This mud-and-wattle town of 6,000 was erased by the 7.6 temblor that struck El Salvador last week, leaving the village’s homes and churches in ruins. On Tuesday, more than half the town’s buildings lay in piles of stick and stone. Residents wandered the streets in shock.

As the national death toll approached 700, rural areas like San Agustin struggled to gain the attention of authorities grappling with the worst disaster to strike El Salvador in more than a decade.

Country towns and hamlets suffered less loss of life than the region around San Salvador, the capital, where a single neighborhood accounted for about a third of the dead. But with fewer economic resources, they faced a long-term problem of reconstruction.

And with communications and roads in disrepair, residents of outlying areas of Central America’s most densely populated country complained that the national government was ignoring their needs.

“We feel isolated and discarded and forgotten,” said Father Carlos Amilcar Perdomo, the town’s parish priest, as he walked through the ruins of his church.

As aftershocks continued to rock homes and offices, Salvadorans were adjusting to the grim spectacle of destruction and the recovery of the dead.

Top government officials proclaimed that overall damage from the so-called Black Saturday temblor may surpass even that of a devastating 1986 quake that left more than 1,500 people dead. One top official predicted that the death toll would double to nearly match the total from the earlier quake.

“This is the worst disaster that El Salvador has suffered in the past 100 years,” said the country’s vice president, Carlos Quintanilla.

A man who was pulled out alive more than 30 hours after the earthquake in the suburb of Nueva San Salvador, and had come to symbolize hope in a nation that has little, died Tuesday night at a hospital. Doctors had amputated Sergio Armando Moreno’s legs, and his heart and kidneys failed.

Aid continued to pour into the country Tuesday. A caravan of more than 100 vehicles arrived from Honduras, and the Nicaraguan president visited Nueva San Salvador, where more than 200 people died when the Las Colinas neighborhood vanished beneath a mudslide triggered by the quake.

But help had only just begun to trickle in for the residents of San Agustin, about 40 miles southeast of the capital. Three people died here, and more than 30 were injured.

Survivors were still sleeping in the street or camping under blue plastic sheets hung between listing walls.

The sewer system remained shattered, though water and electricity service had been restored to some parts of the town. There was no water for bathing, and little medicine. Local churches and charities were providing food from the back of trucks.

Mayor Jose Ignacio Carranza had one working phone line in his office Tuesday. The town hall was missing part of its roof, and dirt and plaster covered the floor. A ceiling tile suspended from a single wire hung over him like a guillotine.

Carranza spoke of the town’s hope of rebirth, of his plans for a better future, of government promises of money and help. But as he began to list the town’s abundance of needs against its paucity of resources, he began to weep.

“There is so much to do, with so many people crying and so many problems,” said Carranza, 36, as tears rolled down his face. “Everything is lost. I ask myself, what is the answer?”

Down the street, Perdomo wandered in the ruins of his parish hall, a priest without a church. After a five-year expansion and improvement project, the building collapsed during the earthquake. Sunday Mass was held outside, punctuated by aftershocks.

Perdomo managed to salvage a life-size wooden sculpture of Jesus, which remained laid out on a stretcher Tuesday like so many other injured quake victims. But a carved wooden figure of St. Augustine, the town’s patron saint, remained trapped in the rubble, its head crushed beneath a wall.

“Ours has been a history of sadness,” the priest said.

Saturday’s earthquake was not the first tragedy to hit San Agustin. The town, once a thriving agricultural center, was the birthplace of one of the first guerrilla groups in El Salvador’s long and brutal civil war, which left more than 75,000 people dead in 12 years.

After peace accords were finalized in 1992, the town’s population, which had dipped to less than half the high of 20,000, began to grow again. Farmers shattered by grinding poverty started to work the land. A new mayor began to build schools.

Then, in 1998, Hurricane Mitch devastated the area, closing down roads for months and ruining crops. Townspeople had only just begun to recover when this week, once again, they found their lives in ruins.

Delores de Jesus Gonzalez swung listlessly in a hammock between two trees. To her left was a pile of rocks that once was her home. To her right, on a pair of black metal sawhorses, sat a gilded coffin containing the body of her mother.

The 80-year-old woman had been praying in a nearby church when the quake struck. Injured in the collapse, she died at a hospital a few hours later.

“This is worse than the war. At least then we had a roof,” said Gonzalez, 56. “All I have now is a few clothes and my little pigs.”

Scenes of destruction were everywhere.

Hilda Rodriguez, 72, sat in the middle of her ruined house, the walls leaning dangerously inward. Surrounded by destruction, she bent over what had been her door to furiously scrub with soap and water some of her family’s clothes.

As visitors approached, she laughed as she brushed off the soapsuds clinging to her face. “I don’t look too bad, do I?” she asked.

Across the street, the town square had been turned into a refugee camp. Blue plastic tents dotted the grounds. One woman hacked at a board with a machete to build a temporary shelter.

Maria Julia Alvarado, 39, sat at her foot-powered sewing machine in the middle of the square, under the shade of the traditional amate tree planted in many such town squares across El Salvador. She was stitching together new clothes for her family members who lost all their belongings in the collapse of their home. She had no idea when, or how, the town would rebuild.

“We’re poor. There’s no work. There’s nothing we can do,” she said.

On the edge of town, in a tiny clearing overlooking thick woods, a young girl sat on a ragged mattress beneath a tree. At the top of her lungs, she sang a hymn, the sound of her thin, high voice mixing with the thunder of helicopters overhead.

Rosa Elva Lainez, 10, said she hadn’t been scared of the earthquake. But as she spoke, a quick, strong aftershock shook the clearing.

“Don’t be scared,” one man said. “You’re safe out here.”