CHILE: Asking for Calm

Disaster would not leave Chile alone. Attempting to placate the gods they held responsible for the continuing quakes in southern Chile, Mapuche Indians last week beat a six-year-old boy to death with sticks, tore out his heart and offered it to the sea. When police arrested two of the Indians, they explained: “We were asking for calm in the sea and on the earth.”

The calm did not come. One day a landslide caused by heavy rains killed 18 people near the city of Valdivia, hard hit by last month’s earthquakes. That night a jolt measuring 7.25 on the Richter scale (which counts any jolt over 7 as a major one) shook southern Chile. Next day a new tremor ten miles north of Valdivia set off another landslide, killing two more people. The following day two heavy quakes struck Concepcion, Chile’s third city and top industrial center. And at week’s end walls collapsed and women screamed hysterically in Valparaiso as a violent quake shook the port city of 200,000.

Amidst such continuing danger, Chile sought to repair earlier damages. Government economists, counting up the cost of nature’s month-long rampage, found that 130,000 houses—one in every three in the earthquake zone—had been destroyed. Total loss: $186 million. Damages to agriculture added up to another $70 million and to factories $34 million. Altogether, Chile’s financial losses from the quake may read as high as $500 million, or about 5% of the nation’s wealth.

The government of President Jorge Alessandri counts heavily on foreign aid, does not intend to levy emergency taxes on foreign companies, Chilean corporations or the Chilean rich. And foreign aid is pouring in. West Germany has offered to rebuild Valdivia; Argentina will aid Chiloé Island; Sweden will help Puerto Saavedra. The U.S. has given most of all. The Export-Import Bank of Washington has lent $10,770,000. Private citizens have donated $5,000,000, and President Eisenhower last week approved a $20 million gift as the “first step” of a broad aid program to Chile’s homeless and desperate people.