Solidarity maintains hope in quake-ravaged Salvadoran village - Statistical Data Included

National Catholic Reporter, March 2, 2001 by Paul Jeffrey

Nearly a month after the convulsing earth shook nearly every home in the Salvadoran village of San Augustin to the ground, Jose Vasquez and his 11-year old son Omar finally managed to free their front door from the rubble. The Vasquez' house pitched forward during the 7.6-magnitude quake on Jan. 13, pinning the front door underneath.

Omar hoisted his prize on his shoulders and carried the extricated door over to the tree where the family has been camping out, using scrap lumber and plastic sheeting to protect them from the unrelenting sun.

"Someday we'll build another house to go with the door," Jose Vasquez said. He smiled and leaned on an iron bar, his tool for prying salvageable material from the jumble of debris.

"I don't know how we'll pay for it, but we have to dream about something. Otherwise we have no future." Meanwhile, Vasquez added, the door would serve well as a bed in his family's temporary refuge.

Vasquez's house once stood at the edge of the central plaza in this small farming village of 7,000. The village nestles against sugar and sesame fields of the hot coastal plain in central Usulutan. It's a tortured land. The people here have withstood drought, death squads and the floods of Hurricane Mitch. Now, after the earthquake, it looks like a bomb fell. Vasquez can stand atop his rubble and look across the plaza, recently filled with tents, and see where the police station stood, the mayor's office, the Catholic church. All are rubble, along with 1,430 houses in San Augustin.

Surprisingly, only four people from this village died in the quake. The death toll would have been higher but for the gentle way the 36-second quake began, giving people time to run from their houses. The death toll nationwide hovers above 840, with hundreds more still missing.

The continuing aftershocks, including the deadly Feb. 13 quake, keep alive the anguish of January. The Feb. 13 quake killed over 280 people throughout El Salvador but did little damage in San Augustin, where little was left to fall.

Most residents of the town, including the parish priest, Fr. Amilcar Perdomo, cough persistently. When the January quake knocked down the adobe walls, the dried mud and straw crumbled into a fine dust. It swirls with every whisper of wind, painting everything in town sepia.

Perdomo is one more homeless resident, living for now in a one-room plywood shelter with a jumble of clothes and personal belongings. All that's left of the church's sanctuary, completed just last year, and the parish residence is a communal kitchen. The priest apologized to a visitor for the mess inside his shelter. It's obviously been a busy time.

Perdomo, 36, was in a nearby village when the quake hit. He came back to San Augustin an hour later. "I couldn't speak for a long time. I felt small, impotent. In such a short time nature had almost done away with us," he told NCR.

`A forgotten land'

According to Perdomo, San Augustin is "a forgotten land." Because it was a guerrilla stronghold during the civil war, the rightist governing party, the Republican Nationalist Alliance (ARENA), has little interest in what happens here, even though their candidate won the local mayor's race by 15 votes. Because of government neglect, people know they have to depend on themselves.

"Hurricane Mitch affected us a lot, but people saw afterward how the government diverted the aid to its own people rather than to the most needy," Perdomo said. "So they know better now than to wait for the government to help." Many have lost the will to struggle against adversity, he said.

"We've been living in permanent crisis here, and many have come to expect nothing but suffering and pain from life. What's happened with the earthquake is much worse than all the years of bombing, worse than Mitch. It's left many feeling there is little space for life here. Some feel abandoned even by God."

He stops, takes a deep breath. He coughs. "As a church we have a lot of work to do."

The rubble of the church building has now been bulldozed away, but the churchyard has been filled with activity in the weeks since the quake, as Catholics from other places have come to help. A team of Catholic volunteers from the lower Lempa Valley, their own villages largely undamaged, arrived shortly after the disaster to help with setting up temporary shelters and distributing emergency food supplies. They were followed by a team of 27 people from the parish of Tocoa, Honduras.

Located in one of the areas hardest hit by Hurricane Mitch, the Jesuit-run parish in Tocoa became a model in Honduras for organizing victims into effective local emergency committees, which over the last two years have transformed local politics in that region. Late last year, the National Human Rights Commissioner of Honduras awarded his annual human rights prize to Peter Marchetti, the Jesuit pastor in Tocoa. (Marchetti is currently on leave from the parish after receiving a series of death threats.)

"We've helped the poorest of the people clean up and build their little temporary houses, at the same time sharing with them the word of God," said Esmeralda Cornejo, the Tocoa group's coordinator. "And we're helping them get organized. You can achieve a lot if you can work together united."