New Tremor Shakes El Salvador

A new strong earth tremor shook El Salvador again late Saturday, scaring local residents but leaving no victims, authorities announced.

The National Committee on Emergencies retracted its earlier report that two people had been killed by the tremor in the northern village of Apopa, saying instead there were no dead or wounded this time.

But the tremor, which was felt in the Salvadoran capital at 2:30 pm (2030 GMT), caused panic among local residents, who have lived through two major earthquakes since the beginning of the year.

As the ground began shaking, people rushed out of restaurants and stores fearing for their lives.

According to the committee, the temblor registered 5.3 on the Richter scale. Its epicenter was located south of the capital San Salvador.

The 6.6 Richter earthquake that shook El Salvador Tuesday left at least 305 dead and 3,153 injured, while the massive 7.7 degree temblor that struck on January 13 left 827 dead and about 2,000 missing.

Already, the quakes are producing social and political turmoil in a once bitterly-divided country still struggling to pick itself up nine years after a bitter civil war was brought to an end.

Dozens of communities have yet to receive even basic aid four days after Tuesday's quake, and several mayors told local media Saturday that death tolls and damage to buildings and crops in fact exceed the official figures.

In the central Salvadoran province of San Vicente alone, rescuers have retrieved the bodies of 53 people from last week's temblor, though official figures show only 37 dead, Colonel Jorge Armando Reyes, who directs rescue teams working in the area, told reporters.

Oscar Navarro is mayor of Candelaria, a small town 23 kilometers (14 miles) east of San Salvador where 19 children and their teacher were buried alive after their school collapsed in Tuesday's quake.

He told reporters Saturday that "a significant number of victims in this village were buried before their families had adequate opportunity to report their deaths."

The disparity in reported figures is only one issue facing this tiny country, which had only just begun to rebuild its infrastructure after 1998's Hurricane Mitch when the first of this year's two earthquakes struck.

In some of the areas worst-affected by the quakes, a political storm is brewing over aid distribution.

In the small town of San Juan Tepezontes and neighboring villages, two rival networks, bearing the colors of Arena, the center-right party of President Francisco Flores, and the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) respectively, compete in distributing rations to meet survivors' immediate needs for food and shelter.

"From poverty to misery," proclaimed an editorial in a leftist newspaper Saturday, evoking the conditions confronting the hundreds of thousands of Salvadoran agricultural workers and seasonal workers in coffee processing plants who have been most impacted by the two quakes.

"The greatest challenge facing our government will be to speedily extricate ourselves from aid dependency and to find a way to generate jobs," Flores said this week.

The FMLN countered that, just as the country's most desperate turn to the government for help, its "priority is to pursue its neoliberal agenda, which will accentuate still further the gaps" between the haves and the have-nots, FMLN representatives said.

Together, the two quakes have caused 2.6 billion dollars in damage to homes, public buildings and roads, authorities have said. Around 1.4 million people are estimated to be homeless.

(www.chinadaily.com.cn)






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