wfn.org | Salvadorans are kept homeless by extreme poverty, earthquakes

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Note #6525 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

11-May-2001
01168

Gimme Shelter

Salvadorans are kept homeless by extreme poverty, earthquakes

by Alexa Smith

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador - The back-to-back earthquakes that convulsed El
Salvador in January and February were massive and deadly. But the real
disaster here is poverty.

	Poverty worsens any other crisis, trapping the poorest people in harm's
way.

	When the earth began rolling, the makeshift shacks and tents that housed El
Salvador's poorest people were the first to slip off the sides of the
parched mountains around this sprawling city. That wasn't because the
shanty-dwellers chose not to build on safer ground, but because they had no
choice:  There was no place else for them to go.

	There still isn't. 

	Which is why - four months and two major earthquakes later - they're staked
out on bald, deforested hillsides, or squatting along gullies that will turn
into rivers in the rainy season, which begins this month.

 	"To have a house in this country is really difficult," said the Rev. Alex
Tobar, who is coordinating the reconstruction phase of earthquake recovery
for the Iglesia Reformada Calvinista and ALFALIT, the church's community
development agency.

	Tobar said most poor people, in urban and rural areas alike, are scavenging
for materials: "You have to build with what you have."

	What they may have are sticks, plastic and scraps of tin or cardboard, all
stuck together in makeshift houses with hard-packed dirt floors that turn to
sludge when it rains.

	Before the earthquakes, there were about 500,000 of these make-do houses.
Now there are about 800,000

	"Even before the earthquake, the economic situation was very bad," said
David Amdur, a U.S. activist from the Committee in Solidarity with the
People of El Salvador, "especially in rural areas. The earthquake just
exposed the levels of poverty.

	"Some of the people living in these tin shacks, in sub-standard housing,
have been there since the earthquake in 1965, and others since the
earthquake in 1986. Other people were displaced by the war. The poverty is
there if you look for it."
The concentration of land and wealth in the hands of a few very rich
families was one of the triggers of the 12-year-long war that exploded in
the 1980s.

	Amdur said the government's new economic model of replacing agriculture
with factory work isn't working for most people.

	That is why more than $1 billion dollars a year is sent to El Salvador
families by relatives working in the United States. Activists say that
income is what keeps the economy from crashing completely - so much so that,
as of last January, the official currency of El Salvador is the U.S. dollar.

	"This country is poor. Let's face it," said Juan Carolos Espinola, UNICEF's
representative to El Salvador, who paints a dire portrait of life in the
shacks and shanties that line the hills and ravines here:  depression,
abuse, despair. "Poverty is close to 30 percent in the rural areas, and 10
to 15 percent in the urban ones.

	The poverty that was already here has just been exacerbated by the
earthquake."

	There is deep reluctance to admit that one of the hemisphere's most brutal
wars did little to affect poverty that is so commonplace here that many
people don't even notice it anymore.
But statistics don't lie.

	UNICEF has reported that 60 percent of El Salvador's rural population lacks
access to safe drinking water. About 16 percent of the people in cities have
the same problem.

	Twenty percent of residents in the countryside lack access to adequate
sanitation, which is available to 98 percent of urban dwellers. In rural
areas, latrines are common, and indoor plumbing is practically unheard of.

	Six thousand children under five years of age die every year. Seventy-seven
percent of kids get a fifth-grade education, but further study is touch and
go.

	El Salvador, roughly the size of Massachusetts, is the most densely
populated country in Central America. Per-capita income is about $1,320 a
year. In 1993, there was one doctor for every 2,312 inhabitants.

	"These are people who want what every human being wants," said Michael
Ring, the national coordinator of the U.S.-El Salvador Sister Cities
Program. "They want their kids to go to school - and not only to the fifth
grade. ... They want access to decent health care. When their kid is sick,
they want a doctor within a reasonable distance who can provide services.
They want a way to survive in an economy where, right now, they can plan on
not eating well part of the year; or, if there's a drought, going hungry.

	"It is pretty basic. They're not asking for the world."

	Officials of the Sister Cities program, which operates in 25 Salvadoran
towns in rural areas, say that, despite land-ownership reforms, small
farmers can't compete with larger agrarian operations, and that is why foods
that might be produced locally, such as corn meal, are imported from
Guatemala or Mexico. Small farmers have little access to credit and no way
to transport produce to city markets.

	When crops fail, affluent investors buy back the land. And the factories -
part of the government's effort to switch from an agrarian to an open market
economy - that are setting up shop in El Salvador pay notoriously low
"sweat-shop" wages. (The Salvadoran Embassy declined to comment on the
government's economic policies.)

	"The fundamental issues that caused the war in the first place - the
social-economic issues in the country - have not changed," said Ring, who
lived in El Salvador for about seven years. "In fact, they've gotten worse."

	Ring said a family of five needs about $400 a month make ends meet in a
Salvadoran city, but the urban minimum wage is about $140 a month. In rural
areas, the average worker makes about $90 a month.

	"People are surviving one day to the next," he said. "That's reality for
half of the Salvadoran population."

	The president of the Reformed church in El Salvador, the Rev. Santiago
Flores, has a similar analysis and admitted that, after the war, the church
got caught up in waiting to see broad political and economic reforms - and
neglected to watch out for needy individuals and families.

	Recovery from the earthquake has made the church see with new eyes. "The
earthquake let us see the conditions people were living in," Flores said.

	What drove the point home for him, he said, was sensing a woman's
embarrassment as she served him tortillas made from a kind of wheat flour
that is usually fed to chickens and pigs. Her family had been subsisting on
it for years.
According to Flores, the new economy puts all the wealth into the hands of a
few, just as the old one did. "Even within the churches, the message of hope
is not radical," he added. "It is room-temperature."

	"Our message is to share what little bit we have."

	Right now, that is mostly building materials to repair collapsed homes,
which can only be undertaken when people own the land they are living on.
Otherwise, the landowners can run off the residents and rent the building to
others.
"Most people who lost houses aren't owners of the land they live on, and
this makes a big problem for us," said Tobar. "We have to ... think about
buying land ourselves, and constructing small communities."

	"There's a major need for agrarian reform," said David Barnhart, the
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)'s Disaster Assistance Program liaison to
Central America. He said squatters often make a bad situation worse, by
deforesting hillsides for firewood and using chemical fertilizers, which
worsen soil erosion. "These disasters aren't just natural disasters."
Barnhart said he has seen many deadly landslides that could have been
prevented if ecological and social problems had been addressed.

	The church in El Salvador has had to adjust its priorities during the
current crisis, since the international community has been slow to respond
financially.

	"When you have this much need, you have to say, 'We can't do all of this. 
We can only do this much,'" said Barnhart, a strong proponent of  buying
land and relocating poor families to safer ground.  "It is a long,
complicated process. ... But most people here don't own land.  So they live
on available land, and the land that is available is on riverbanks and on
the sides of mountains."

	Rudelmar Bueno de Faria, the Lutheran World Federation's representative in
El Salvador, pointed out that building a house is just the first step.
People also need water, sanitation, electricity and schools, which are
lacking in the countryside. "There will probably be another war here in the
future due to the lack of water. The rich buy drinkable water ..."

	"Can you imaging not having a house to live in when you have seven
children?" he asked. "Not having money? Not having food? Not having a job? 
These are the people we're very concerned about."

	Families that do have roofs over their heads often sleep in one room, three
or four people to a bed, a middle-aged Salvadoran said.

	"Is it good accommodations?" he asked with a shrug. "They don't have any
choice. They're happy to have that. Here in El Salvador, being poor is
normal. Everybody is poor."

	What kind of house would he like?

	"There would be privacy. And a rug. A green space outside where I could
hang my hammock. I'd also have water. And it would be in a safe spot, where
it is not going to flood in the winter or go in a landslide. ...
	"To have this house, I'd have to have a job," he said.

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