Death of a City
Diocesan Press Service. January 26, 1973 [73020]
Hugh McCullum, editor, The Canadian Churchman, Toronto.
(NOTE: The following article was written for The Canadian Churchman and the Diocesan Press Service by Hugh McCullum, editor of The Canadian Churchman, Toronto. He spent 10 days in Managua in order to give a firsthand report on relief work.)
"Managua esta muerte," the cab driver kept muttering as we drove through the cracked streets of the once carefree and hospitable capital of Nicaragua.
Bent and torn Ule decorations flapped eerily in the hot dusty breeze. They'd never been taken down after the earth began to heave that night just two days before Christmas.
In broken English he told me how his city went "up and down at first" and then "from side to side " just after midnight and in less than two hours of violent seismic shocks was virtually destroyed.
By noon the next day -- Christmas eve -- more than 600 blocks of the city centre was flattened and as many more were damaged beyond repair.
Terror struck and more than 100,000 people clogged the roads. As always in disasters the poorest were hit hardest but this latest of three earthquakes that had destroyed Managua (the others in 1885 and 1931) was no respecter of people.
The wood, tin and adobe shacks in the crowded downtown slums crumbled along with the office towers and modern middle class apartments of the Avenida Central. The sprawling homes and haciendas of the rich along the low volcanic hills on the city's outskirts caved in along with badly constructed three-room suburban homes of the white- collar class.
In the days that followed there was no water or electricity and people fought with themselves and the authorities for food. Looting and burning destroyed much of what was left.
Strongman Anastasias Somoza looked after his National Guard who shot looters as they, themselves, helped strip those stores not totally destroyed.
Bodies lay in the rubble. The smell of putrid flesh hung over the city and by the end of the week Managua was quietly decaying, desolate and truly "muerte. "
But today, three weeks later, Managua will survive if the quakes that people live in constant fear of don't return. The downtown is cordoned off, a ghost town. Only those with passes can get in and the scene looks like the results of saturation bombing.
Only Warsaw, Dresden, Berlin and Hanoi, victims of man-made destruction, could be worse.
The government bulldozed whole sections and limed over others before the decaying bodies could create worse health hazards. Yellow flags signifying demolition hang over most buildings. The ancient cathedral squats ugly and cracked and useless, its crosses hanging madly askew over a clock stopped at 12:23 -- a memorial to man's ability to shrug off one disaster after another and rebuild where it all happened before.
And Somoza, whose family owns most of the nation and has dictatorially run it with American help for more than 40 years, is determined that Managua will remain where it is. Better built perhaps, with estimates a billion-dollare construction boom already rumored, hovering over the scene of another potential disaster.
But Managuans have fatalistically shrugged it off before and it seems they'll do it again.
"Everyone here loves Managua. It's a shrine now. People don't want to move," one man told me.
Somoza, whose plush ranch style home called El Petiro was built to withstand earthquakes and suffered only one crack, is said to own vast tracts of the existing downtown area. He says there is no place else to rebuild the capital despite the opinions of numerous geologists to the contrary.
The experts say Managua sank more than 12 inches in the last seismic movement and is still unstable. Somoza says Northern Nicaragua which is less earthquake-prone is too far from present communications for easy access.
The decision has been made most knowledgeable Monaguans believe, although official announcements haven't quite been announced.
But whatever the decisions are, it's certain they'll be made by Somoza, a West Point graduate who has served already one term as president. The ruling triumvirate that replaced him has broken up in face of the earthquake and his control of the 5,000-man army. More than ever the fate of Managua lies in his powerful hands.
Today his home is the centre of all government activity. Housed in tents everything, including the army, food distribution and what government organization is left runs out of his big backyard. His wife, Hope, a striking woman of enormous ability and power, directs personally all the medical services in the city and controls much of what government welfare exists.
Volunteer agencies working out of the National Seminary (Roman Catholic) must still clear much of their emergency operations through her formidable power.
The National Emergency Committee, of which Somoza is president, controls the whole disaster aid program and has unlimited power. Using U.S. experts, it has set up a distribution system that works after a fashion -- at least no one is starving to death and more than 400,000 are getting some kind of food -- mostly rice and beans -- daily. But local distribution is in the hands of canton (roughly equivalent to a grouping of polling areas in a Canadian electoral riding) chiefs who are political workers of the Somoza "Liberal " party. Charges are common that political cronies are paid off and the poor get what's left. Small pockets of people are ignored and endless lineups are normal.
Most of the poor are hungry, for those with money food is no problem. But with 15 percent unemployment before the quake and the ravages of the drought already in effect, there are at least half a million people with no money and estimates of 500, 000 pounds of food needed daily until next year's crops can come in are not exaggerated.
Medical services are reasonable considering that there are none of the existing hospitals left but two American field hospitals have been donated by the U.S. government and are the basis for a continuing medical program. Volunteer emergency clinics attempt to meet the needs of the poor but a shortage of supplies hampers their operation.
But from her command post at El Petiro, Hope Somoza claims that within 36 hours "we had met the emergency from a medical point-of-view. " But many would dispute her claims, charging that medicine is often used as a weapon to keep things running more efficiently.
But back in the city the tinsel fluttering over the piles of smashed concrete and charred rubble, Somoza talks of open spaces where the known faults now run underground and new buildings constructed according to a strict earthquake code] perhaps using models now in existence in San Francisco.
A building boom might help ease the colossal unemployment caused by the twin disasters of earthquake and drought, but whether long term safety for the masses will result is another matter.
And whether the poor, who make up the bulk of the population, will ever afford anything more than the shatter-prone adobe buildings is not clear. Certain wooden buildings survived the quake and are being promoted now as material for emergency shelter which will be needed when the rainy season comes later this year but they are prone to the fires that accompany most quakes.
Aid is not lacking immediately. So far more than $10,000,000 has come from the U.S. government alone and volunteer agencies have poured in another million dollars in money and supplies. Most of it seems to be getting to the people although there is no doubt that favoritism and political patronage are rampant.
It is the infrastructure that worries serious planners. Highly centralized, the government is now in total chaos. Most schools were wiped out, hospitals, community projects, churches, orphanages, social welfare agencies have all disappeared. In short all requirements for normal community life fail to exist.
People are in shock, fighting only for survival and sociologists and psychologists fear the consequences for society when the shock wears off and the grim reality of their fearful situation dawns on the average Managuan. So far the government has no plans to meet this problem.
Critics of the government are many, but cautious for fear of reprisal. But they point out that big industry survived almost unscathed while small businesses were wiped out. Small loans for those people plus low interest money for housing, agricultural work and small individual development projects are needed. Non-governmental agencies are the answer here, they insist, and the government seems willing to let them move in. Coordination is important but evidence exists that thinking Managuans will cooperate.
Out of chaos comes some order. Each day Managuans revive more.
I get ready to leave. One more trip past the guards to behind the barbed wire past the endless blocks of ruined, wrecked, gutted, twisted piles of rubble and crazy, tilted buildings.
I scuff my way through melted, soot blackened Christmas toys piled in the gutters next to a restaurant with plates and spoons fused together at hastily vacated tables.
I listen for the last time to the haunting whine of the wind down the empty, muted streets and only the banging of loose tin and the swish of the overhead wires reminds me that people once lived here.
I step over a street lamp lying in front of a seven-storey hotel, now one storey high and smell the still smouldering acrid fires that disguise the rotting smell of bodies still buried beneath the stones.
I pick up some business envelopes lying in the street and make some notes:
" Modern Managua like all modern cities was glass and plastic and now the weird shapes and mounds of man's energy lie heaped in the silent streets melted by the fury of man and nature into a mass of colored wreckage.
"A hotel room stands at street level, the bed unmade, the carpet unstained. The room number is 306. I can look through the empty window frame from the road. People were laughing here that night, living, perhaps loving, and then dying.
"Across from the cathedral is the colonial-looking Managua club where a big dance was held Dec. 23 and 150 died here.
"And always the sounds and rattles of the wind.
"And the constant smells of the rotting garbage, dead bodies and burned wood.
"Here's a library filled with the ashes of burned books and hanging loosely, flapping in the wind, a sign that says ' silencio ' and now the sign is heeded.
"And across the street that pagoda-like building, burned inside, has a sign that says ' China Palace Restaurante' and piles of melted plastic chopsticks weave oriental patterns on the pavement.
" I meet a man who has lost four million cordovas worth of construction equipment. The day the earthquake struck his buildings were damaged and his equipment partially wrecked but much of it salvageable. He came back two days later and found nothing. All looted, then burned They should have shot all Somoza's bastards, he mutters, meaning the national guard.
"Another supermarket just like the rest except the turnstiles still work. But inside the shelves are burned and bare, the hungry have been fed, if not by their governors, then by themselves. 'If you won't give it to us, then we'll take it.'
"And always the clouds of flies and overhead the funny looking buzzards who feed on dead flesh and whose expert work has probably helped stave off the predicted epidemics.
" The Intercontinental Hotel, sitting like a squat unfinished pyramid that housed that strange lonely capitalist, Howard Hughes, who fled Dec. 23 leaving not a penny to his hosts. The hotel, symbol of Managuan gaiety and its luxury-loving rich is empty, its classy rooftop restaurant tilted like a cap down one side.
"And the empty newspaper plant and TV studio, government owned, at last free of censorship but silent.
"And always the emptiness so that when you see a face, you look for recognition and don't know anyone but the look is the same, fear, despair, the emptiness with just a glimmer of hope. The eyes are clouded, unsure. The shock is there but wearing off and they say –
"'No home, no job, no money, nada.'
Nothing, only the will to live.
To visit Managua is to have a sense of history. Managua, "muerte " before, " muerte " again ?
Despite all his progress, man still shares with his ancient forebears the helplessness before a tremble of the earth. The mistakes of Pompeii have been repeated before in Managua -- and will be repeated again.
But the people must live and Managua will live.