Chile: Winter’s Toll

Chile’s able President Eduardo Frei has one of the most ambitious and soundly reasoned development programs in LatinAmerica−if he can ever get started. Nature seems to be conspiring against him. Last March, after only five months in office, Frei faced a major rebuilding program when an earthquake ravaged central Chile, killing 210 people, leaving some 18,000 homeless, and causing damage amounting to $80 million. Last week a saddened Frei again toured disaster-strewn streets, taking the measure of the worst winter in modern memory.

Howling in from the South Pacific, a succession of violent storms with 65-m.p.h. winds has been raking a 1,000-mi. central strip where lowland floods and Andean avalanches have already left 88 dead, scores injured, some 90,000 homeless. On the Andes’ eastern slopes in Argentina, more avalanches have killed another 43. In Chile the most crippling losses hit crops, livestock and public property.

Becoming a Quagmire. The winter skies darkened last month, when ten days of rain turned central Chile into a sodden quagmire. Dirt roads, track beds and bridges were washed away. A fortnight ago, when gale-force winds slammed through Valparaiso and Santiago into the Andes, bringing more rains and blizzards, Chileans recognized a new national disaster.

In its first three days, the storm dumped 3.5 inches of rain−75% of the 1964 rainfall−on the lowlands and four feet of snow daily in parts of the Andes. Just before dawn one morning in Portillo, a fashionable resort 9,000 ft. up in the Andes, an avalanche hurled a reinforced concrete hut 60 yds. down the slope, killing five of 14 skiers asleep inside. In Santiago, the flood-swelled Mapocho River swept away thousands of slum dwellers’ shacks, turned the city’s broad avenues into raging streams. And the wind! In one schoolyard, a group of children stood paralyzed by fear as a furious blast of air lifted the roof of their school, then slammed it down in their midst. Three were killed; another seriously injured.

Seawall in the Street. North of the seaport of Valparaiso, two hills suddenly collapsed into mud, trapping a 700-passenger train between them. At Vina del Mar, seaside playground of rich Chileans, boiling waves hurled huge boulders from the seawall into the streets. Farther south near Valdivia, the naval ocean-going tug Janequeo was dashed against rocks and sank; 43 of 72 crewmen died.

At midweek the sun finally broke through the clouds over Santiago, and the worst seemed over at last. President Frei gratefully acknowledged emergency aid from the U.S. and other countries, and already a bootstrap effort had begun. All over Santiago last week, boy scouts and students were collecting money and clothing; the tags they wore on their coats read: “Together we shall rebuild Chile.”