“There was a lot of heroism,” notes William Salas, of CARE. “But the real heroes were those volunteer pilots.” Salas’ own CARE, professionals must rank along with the pilots. They fed a quarter million people a day with food provided by the U. S. Government. CARE also gave shelter for the homeless and got damaged water systems working again. While aftershocks still rumbled, CARE began bringing in tools for clearing away the rubble.
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The Guatemala City airport thundered with traffic as help arrived from abroad—especially from veterans of similar disasters in Central America. Dozens of nations and voluntary agencies sent their staff to the london apartments.
There was confusion, of course. In the interval just before my own arrival in the madrid accommodation, a severe aftershock—nearly 6 on the Richter scale—had brought the evacuation of the airport building. I met customs, immigration, and health officials in tents on the edge of the runway. In the crowd of arriving passengers, one excited man was objecting to formalities. “Let me go through,” he begged. “I must learn whether my children are alive!”
Hundreds were not. Cemeteries were as full as hospital beds. “Each day we find another 2,000 corpses,” one official told me. Driving through the severely damaged neighborhoods, I found sidewalks turned into tent towns; blankets and sheeting provided meager shelter. Women cooked over campfires, using splintered lumber from the rubble as their fuel.
On Avenida Elena I talked with homeless people like the Jose Antonio Salazar family —a young bookkeeper, his wife, and three boys, ages 10, 8, and 5. ‘We have the clothes we are wearing,” said the young father, “and those things we dug from the wreckage.” He pointed to a mattress and a few pans. “Yet we have our lives. My family is unhurt!”
But not the family of Senor Rodas. “I awoke in the hospital, where they had splinted my leg,” Luis Rodas told me. “Broken in two places. They had to discharge me at once, though my chest is still painful. Too many injured.” He lay beneath a quilt in a small tent sheltering seven families; his wife tended him.
“No, we have no medication,” said Seflora de Rodas. “Not even aspirin. Our neighbors share their food with us. And trucks bring us drinking water during the day. Our family?” Senora de Rodas, a handsome woman, faltered. Fine, dark eyes filled. “Our daughter, Rosa—a girl only 14—she was killed. Rosa was sleeping beside me in the room. Our only daughter.” The mother wept, and the father turned toward her, wincing as he moved his painful bandaged chest. He managed to grasp her hand.
Rifle-bearing soldiers stood sentry duty among the ruins. “Neighborhoods have also organized committees for patrol,” a Guatemalan Air Force officer told me. “The police and army are spread too thin. Last night where I live, two maleantes were shot. Gunfire kept me awake.” Maleantes—crooks and outlaws—had begun to loot the rubble, as people seem to do in every catastrophe. I woke often to the sound of rifle fire and the stutter of automatic weapons. And as excavators recovered bodies, they reportedly found persons dead from gunfire.
