San Salvador’s Streets ‘Home’ to Thousands

SAN SALVADOR —  Lined with chairs and bureaus, bedrolls and bags of clothing, the streets of the capital have become home for thousands of Salvadorans who are camped in front of their crumbled houses.

They have made shelters of blankets and cardboard to protect their belongings, their injured and, in some cases, their dead.

On Las Mercedes Street in the hard-hit San Jacinto neighborhood, Francisco Vasquez stood staring at his daughter’s white casket that rested on a bed frame recovered from the rubble.

“She was my whole life,” said Vasquez, a truck driver.

Daughter Buried by Wall

Vasquez lost his house as well as his 15-year-old daughter, Graciela. She was walking home from school when the earthquake struck Friday, dumping a brick wall and a live electric wire on top of her. She was electrocuted.

“I was away in San Miguel. I didn’t know until this morning,” Vasquez said. “I brought her these oranges.”

There are perhaps 10,000 new homeless like Vasquez in San Salvador, a city already bulging with tens of thousands of refugees from the country’s seven-year-old civil conflict.

The war refugees live in camps or with friends and relatives. The earthquake homeless are living in the streets, in parks, on empty lots under their improvised huts.

Poor before the quake, most are poorer after it, having lost homes that, no matter how humble, will be difficult to replace. The hardest hit were those poor living in shanties made of wood, cement and corrugated sheet metal.

Fifty-nine families who lived in the crowded Meson San Pablo complex with Vasquez also are in the street, out of their homes and in many cases now out of work.

Jesus Miguel Umana, 76, and his family of six are camped around the corner in the Baptist High School’s playground, awaiting donations of food and deliveries of water. The bakery where Umana worked also collapsed.

“We are waiting for the will of God, waiting to see who can help,” he said.

But his son-in-law, Daniel Herrera, was not so patient.

“The people who have food don’t want to sell it. They say they are saving it for themselves,” Herrera said. “The crisis is going to be even worse now for poor people.”

Barbershops, shoe repair shops, corner stores, beauty parlors and scores of “mom and pop” businesses were among the damaged and destroyed buildings in a city that already suffers from 50% unemployment.

Cooking in the Street

In the nearby neighborhood of Santa Anita, Jose Escobar’s family was also cooking and sleeping in the street.

“First the war, and now the earthquake,” said Escobar, 30, the father of three.

“Next it will be that volcano, El Cerro San Jacinto,” he added, pointing to a green mountain on the horizon.

Escobar said that emergency water supplies have not yet been delivered to Cuba Street. He said he hopes that it will not rain while they sleep outside. Already, the children had diarrhea “from fright,” he added. And Friday night, as they slept in the streets, they had heard gunfire on the outskirts of the city.

“Combat,” Escobar said. “The war.”

Paramedics Worked

Down the block, the Green Cross was operating a field hospital, where 13-year-old Ana Vasquez tried her best not to cry as paramedics bandaged her broken foot.

“I was going to buy tortillas when the wall fell on me. No one saw me. I screamed and finally they dug me out. But a man was buried there,” she said.

Tired medical workers said they had eaten only a few sardines since Friday and had not slept.

Mattresses and cots lined the sidewalk. Five-year-old Irene Beatriz Martinez lay on one with a broken right leg and two broken collarbones, her father sitting by her side.

“Papa,” she said, eyes welling with tears.

“What, my love?”

“Papa.”

The streets were clouded with dust as thick as fog in the afternoon sun. The streets were buckled and impassable in many cases and snarled with traffic in others.

Police with automatic rifles stood guard over the splintered wood and broken bricks. Block by block, the homeless sat on curbs and sections of fallen walls.

“We’re going to look for somewhere to live,” said Hilda Gonzalez, 49. “See if we can rebuild.”