CHAPTER 1
1. The Effects of an Earthquake
1. The Facts about the Earthquake
On 4 February 1976, in the early hours of the morning, the Central American Republic of Guatemala was struck by a savage earthquake, measuring 7.5 degrees on the Richter scale, which caused appalling loss of life and material damage. Of a total population of approximately 5,500,000, over 22,000 were killed, more than 77,000 injured and over 1,000,000 made homeless. It was the severest natural catastrophe in Central America during the twentieth century.
Almost the entire country was affected. Whereas the 1972 earthquake in Nicaragua had struck only the capital city, this catastrophe affected no less than sixteen of Guatemala's twenty-two provinces. In the province of Chimaltenango in the central highlands, inhabited mainly by Indian small farmers and rural workers, 41,677 out of 42,794 homes were destroyed. In the provinces of El Progreso and Zacapa in the eastern lowlands 10,737 homes out of 15,743 and 14,288 out of 20,989 respectively were destroyed. The poorer districts of Guatemala City were equally badly affected.
2. The Social Dimension
Despite the severity of the disaster, the residential, commercial and large industrial sectors of Guatemala City and the country as a whole were barely touched. The agro-industrial structure equally escaped the consequences. The vast sugar, cotton and coffee estates, producing the export crops which bring in Guatemala's foreign exchange, are concentrated in the coastal and south-eastern areas, the two areas least affected by the earthquake. The only significant damage for this sector was the destruction of wharf facilities at Puerto Barrios (from which bananas are exported to the USA), and the collapse of a large bridge on the main highway from Guatemala City to this same port.
In Guatemala City the social nature of the disaster was at its most striking. The numerous residential districts were virtually unaffected. The city is on a well-known fault line that has experienced innumerable earthquakes, major and minor, over the· past hundred years. All those who could afford it had constructed earthquake-resistant housing or industrial premises, and were thus largely unaffected. By contrast, many of the poorer districts were devastated. In the marginal squatter settlements of 'La Trinidad' and 'El Gallito' perched perilously on the edge of ravines, adobe huts plummeted down the slopes as the volcanic soil gave way. Many of the inhabitants were self-employed artisan workers, who lost their livelihood along with their homes. An estimated 45,000 artisans were affected.
Within days of the earthquake, the chambers of commerce and industry were able to announce that the productive sector had not suffered serious damage. Though 147 industrial establishments reported some adverse effects, they were rarely major. Productivity was halted above all by the national loss of electricity in the two days after the 'quake, and by the widespread fear caused by the continuing tremors in the days after 4th February. For management the problems were primarily social, since the labour force came predominantly from the affected areas. The prime concern of management could be seen in a large publicity campaign designed to normalise production as soon as possible. "Reconstruction without loss of production" was the prevailing slogan of the day ...
From today onwards we need more action and less tears. We need to get into shirt sleeves and to sweat, to sweat, work and reconstruct. From today onwards the national slogan is reconstruction without loss of production ... God is on our side, God is Guatemalan ...
But such propaganda ignored one major question. Production and reconstruction for whom, and at what cost? The earthquake occurred at a time of growing labour unrest, when workers were taking advantage of the degree of support for trade union freedom professed by President Kjell laugerud (under his predecessor, President Carlos Arana, virtually no independent trade union activity had been permitted). Groups had been organising within many industrial establishments, in attempts to gain legal recognition for labour unions. Unions members were protected by law against unfair dismissal only after the union's legal status (personeria juridica) had been officially recognised by the Ministry of labour; and in many cases management had dismissed organised workers before this legal status was granted. The pattern was repeated in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. In one textile factory 120 workers (all the unofficial union members) were dismissed in the week of the earthquake. In one food factory, management was reportedly assisted by the National Police in carrying out arbitrary dismissals. The pattern was to be repeated many times over the coming months. There can be no doubt that the earthquake had strong repercussions on the development of the labour movement in Guatemala. Labour unrest was by no means caused by the disaster, but was significantly accentuated by it. When arbitrary dismissal occurred on top of personal tragedy, the events took on greater political dimensions, and attracted a greater degree of popular and media support for the dismissed workers than had previously been the case (see Chapter III).
3. A Violent Response
The shanty towns of Guatemala City, destroyed by the earthquake, had been as miserable as any in Latin America. Many of them were on private lots whose owners had permitted temporary squatter settlement in makeshift huts but not the construction of stable housing. Moreover the owners, to keep their land assets as liquid as possible, had not permitted the establishment of services of any kind. There was no lighting, no drainage, no running water, no sanitation, in many areas no roads. Ironically, the location of the squatter settlements was the result of an earlier earthquake of 1917; the residential districts had taken up all available land on the city outskirts, leaving only the dangerous ravine areas for squatter settlement.
For the vast numbers of squatters in particular, the earthquake of February 1976 posed an insoluble problem. The ravine areas were a mass of rubble and fallen earth, and further settlement there was prohibited on safety grounds. There was nowhere for these people to go. While some families set up improvised tents and huts in the few public parks or by the roadside, others moved to vacant privately-owned lots. In normal times land invasions would be met with violence, and after the earthquake the response was little different. On 20 February 1976 Rolando Andrade Pena, a leading municipal official and prominent member of the FUR opposition party!, was machine-gunned to death, in the middle of Guatemala City. Though the assassination may have had wider political motives, it was widely believed that his murder was due to the support he had given to the invasion of private land. At about the same time, leaders of the squatter invasions were arrested without warrant (some people believe that their lives were saved only by the protest rally convened straight after their arrest). On February 23rd came more signs that the invasion of private land would not be tolerated by the authorities. Twenty-five families who had settled on the San Julian estate in one of the affected zones were forced off by the national police, this time without violence or reprisals.
On the same day, a journalist from the daily newspaper El Grafico observed that the death of Rolando Andrade Pena, and an attack on Christian Democrat party headquarters during the same week, signified a return to 'political normality'. In the month after the earthquake there were over fifty such assassinations (many of them accompanied by torture), giving rise to press reports that a 'Death Squad' of off-duty policemen had resumed its activities. As with the arbitrary labour dismissals, the violence and intimidation after the earthquake was only a repetition of traditional patterns, and the victims, were predominantly from the same sectors. The right-wing political terror, like the earthquake, barely affected the wealthy of Guatemala City, the businessmen or the landowners.
4. The Earthquake and the Peasantry
Statistically, the sector most calamitously affected by the earthquake was the highland peasantry. Remote villages were devastated, particularly in the central highland provinces of Chimaltenango and Sacatepequez, and the lowland areas of Zacapa and El Progreso. In the short term, relief problems were accentuated by the virtual inaccessibility of many villages cut off by landslides. But within a few days a massive inflow of emergency aid (particularly from, church and voluntary organisations) helped to relieve food, medical and shelter problems in many highland areas. It was in the devastated villages around Chimaltenango that much of the non-governmental foreign aid went in the provision of food and urgently needed construction and roofing materials, which were distributed at subsidised cost in this area through the existing cooperative organisations. In many ways the relief organisations performed an outstanding task in alleviating human suffering in the months after the earthquake. But two factors stand out as a measure of the marginality of the Guatemalan peasant to the national economy and society. First that, when whole provinces inhabited by small farmers had been devastated, it could still be claimed that national agricultural production had not been seriously affected. Second that, in a country where peasant organisation had been one of the strongest in Latin America some twenty years earlier, the relief work had to be entrusted largely to foreign organisations. Whole areas were allocated to foreign governments and private organisations, who were given freedom to conduct relief and reconstruction work according to their own philosophies. The degree of popular participation often depended exclusively on the good will and political sense of the individual relief organisations.
Statistics of loss of life and property indicate the scale of the physical destruction. Other factors must also be taken into account. Marketing and storage facilities were also destroyed, affecting the small agricultural surplus that the subsistence farmer needed at harvest time. One estimate within fifteen days of the earthquake gave a deficit of 500,000 quintales of maize and 200,000 quintales of beans (the two staple foods of the peasant farmer). Moreover, the earthquake came at a time when many of the small farmers were customarily away from home performing the annual period of seasonal migratory labour on the coastal estates. Those who left the estates were given no compensation, and the loss of surplus income could be as crucial as the loss of the home itself.
In some cases, the estate owners themselves were concerned to protect their labour supply. And it was significant that the Herrera and Castillo families, the two Guatemalan families to make a substantial contribution to rural reconstruction, concentrated on the rebuilding of their fincas de mozos in the highlands (farms kept as a labour reserve by the large landowners, who allow landless labourers to cultivate plots there on the condition that they work on their estates during harvest time).
Within weeks of the earthquake, the rural sector was once again the victim of widespread violence. In the badly affected province of Quiche, the Guatemalan army was carrying out counter-insurgency operations at the same time as relief organisations were involved in reconstruction. On 19 and 20 March 1976, in response to reports of subversive activities, a group of armed men in civilian clothes passed through military roadblocks and kidnapped nine men from the villages of Cotzal, Chajul and Nebaj. They have since disappeared. Despite the protests of opposition members and church officials, there was no official investigation into the disappearances. Again, this was but a return to 'political normality'. In July 1975 over thirty peasants had 'disappeared' from the small village of Xalbal de Ixcan Grande, Quiche province, in the course of a military offensive against alleged guerrilla activity. And in January 1976, just one month before the earthquake, church leaders denounced the arbitrary assassination of four peasants in Chi sec, Alta Vera paz, by members of the Border Patrol (Guardia de Hacienda).
Many observers were impressed by the stoical courage with which the Guatemalan peasantry set about repairing the earthquake damage. But they have long been inured to such hardship and persecution. We have compared the loss of lives through the earthquake with those through physical violence; but many more lives again are lost through poor and often non-existent medical treatment, and also the serious food shortages that have affected the peasantry in recent years. Even without drought conditions, cases of child mortality are rarely much under 20,000 per year; while according to surveys of the Nutrition Institute for Central America and Panama (INCAP) three-quarters of Guatemalan children under five suffer from malnutrition. Of the thousands of homes destroyed, the majority were classified in a recent census as grossly inadequate. Educational facilities are rudimentary or non-existent, and the level of rural illiteracy is one of the highest in Latin America. Since the overthrow of the reformist Arbenz government in 1954, and the reversal of the 1952 agrarian reform, the destruction of the peasant movement has ensured that peasants have little access to land, credit or the services of national development institutions. Though advances have been made in recent years through the cooperative movement, a relatively small sector of the peasantry (and only the property-owning peasantry) has benefited from this (see Chapter IV). In one sense everything, and in another sense almost nothing, had been lost.
5. The Politics of Reconstruction
In the words of some critics, the earthquake served to 'remove the mask' from Guatemala's face, and reveal the true nature of social injustice. While this was plainest in Guatemala City, where the rich and poor lived a few yards apart, it was equally true (if not so evident) in the rural areas.
In the first days after February 4th, the government showed its good intentions in confronting the immediate emergency. There were none of the allegations so rife after the earthquake of December 1972 in the nearby country of Nicaragua, where relief supplies were reportedly stolen by government and police officials. Food and medical supplies were allocated swiftly to relief organisations who were permitted the necessary independence with which to conduct their work.
But the immediate emergency relief, despite its obvious importance, was politically a simpler task than long-term reconstruction. In the latter there were far greater resources to be allocated, and far greater political interests at stake. President Laugerud affirmed at the outset that his government's long-term policy was not only to restore the physical infrastructure of the country, but to "diminish poverty" and "eliminate the segregation of marginal groups from all wealth, all opportunity and all hope of economic, spiritual and cultural advancement". The aim was to be the "promotion and realisation of genuine progress in the development of the popular sectors, urban as well as rural".
In these words the Guatemalan president was perhaps accepting the arguments of radical critics, that the old Guatemala was barely worth reconstructing. But at the same time President Laugerud was careful to mollify his right-wing critics and stress that in his reconstruction policies, as in his overall development policies, he would not attack the landed and wealthy classes but would seek the creation of new wealth rather than the redistribution of existing wealth. "The essence of my politics does not substitute wealth, neither in law nor in the structure of property. Opportunities for progress, for advance in development, for access to better living standards ... are being achieved and will continue to be achieved without the destruction of wealth already created". At the same time the President appealed for national unity between management and labour sectors, and for an end to the political violence that had plagued the country for the past decade.
The composition of the Reconstruction Committee was an important factor in that partisan political interests were bound to be represented. After an initial power struggle, in which supporters of ex-President Arana vied for control of emergency operations through a National Emergency Committee, this was replaced by a National Reconstruction Committee including more progressive military figures and a broad spectrum of conservative and moderate politicians. Although several members of the Reconstruction Committee were subject to harassment and death threats from right-wing extremist groups, the Committee held together and was able to dictate the reconstruction policies. In housing, these policies involved the provision of low interest loans through the National Agricultural Development Bank (BANDESA) and the National Housing Bank (BANVI). BANDESA and BANVI sold essential building materials to individual farmers and townspeople at cost price, to offset the rapid rise in price since the earthquake. Within months of the earthquake, BANVI also purchased land in four districts of Guatemala City and in neighbouring towns to provide new settlements for the homeless, and financed the construction of emergency housing settlements in affected areas of Guatemala City. Substantial funds were injected into BANVI, through multi-million dollar loans from the International Bank for Reconstruction and – Development – IBRD (World Bank), the Inter-American Development Bank – IDB, and the emergency aid branch – FONDEM – of the Organisation of American States.
