A BIG EARTHQUAKE REVEALS TWO VERY DIFFERENT COLOMBIAS / THE ECONOMIST

 Shaken

A big earthquake reveals two very different Colombias

The new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, took office three days before it struck

Photograph: AP

“They pulled people out alive,” says Alberto, an onlooker, as a digger’s steel teeth smash into a heap of concrete. 

It is all that remains of a four-storey building in Quibdó, a city in the western state of Chocó that was near the epicentre of a 7.4-magnitude earthquake which struck Colombia August 10th. 

Aftershocks brought down more buildings. Around the country, at least 254 people have died.

The earthquake was as powerful as the deadly pair that devastated Venezuela in June. 

But it occurred about ten times deeper in the Earth’s crust, reducing its destructive force. 

Crucially, too, the Colombian government reacted much faster than the Venezuelan regime. 

Abelardo de la Espriella, sworn in as president only three days before the tremors, assumed command of the situation.

Yet the earthquake has still highlighted local deprivation. 

Chocó is Colombia’s poorest state. 

The hospital in Quibdó is the only place that offers even basic surgery. 

Bandits extort the poor population, 75% of whom are Afro-Colombian and 13% indigenous. 

Alberto complains about a lack of machinery: “The municipality is in bad shape,” he says. 

Rescue teams started work on the morning of the 11th, but the end of a 72-hour window after the quake, reckoned to be the period in which lives can be saved, is drawing near. 

Of the three people pulled out the rubble, two have died. 

The people of Chocó, Alberto says, have been “abandoned by the state”.

That contrasts with efforts under way in the rich neighbouring region of Valle del Cauca. 

In Cali, its capital, 86 people have been rescued, with expert teams sent from Bogotá, the country’s capital. 

Unlike in remote Chocó, it has been possible to bring aid overland to the hard-hit cities of Manizales and Pereira, where more than half of the deaths have been recorded so far (possibly because the data collection is better, rather than the destruction worse).

Mr de la Espriella seems aware of the disparities. 

His cabinet has been dispatched to the worst-affected areas. 

On Monday, from Quibdó, he said that victims would receive temporary housing aid. Yet many families are wondering where that is. 

“We have no water, no energy, no nothing,” says Rosa Mercedes, staring at the ruin of her apartment in Chocó. 

“No one has come to ask us what happened, to ask us how we are,” she says.

Colombia’s new president also faces the problem of how to pay for recovery from the quake. 

He has declared an economic emergency, allowing him to spend the national budget by decree, bypassing Congress. 

The new government has also inherited a mess in the key agency for natural-disaster response. 

The National Unit for Disaster Risk Management is cash-strapped after being robbed by corrupt politicians and functionaries over the past few years. 

Some talk of the country’s population suffering as badly as it did in 1999 when an earthquake killed around 1,230 people.

The earthquake has forced Mr de la Espriella to be more pragmatic than his campaign promises suggested he might be. 

He had previously vowed to shun the capital, Bogotá, home to what he calls the “same as always” elites. 

But his talk of running things instead from his home city of Barranquilla, on the other side of the country from where the quake struck, now looks even more unwise. 

It is in the capital where ministries, big media outlets or international partners can be accessed.

He is paying, too, for his foolish refusal to co-operate with the handover process initiated by the previous government. 

That was a “silly populist idea”, says Luis Ernesto Gómez, a former interior vice-minister. 

Badmouthing Gustavo Petro, his leftist predecessor, was popular on social media. 

The erratic Mr Petro himself was posting with if anything more ferocity. 

But the result is that the new government lacks information and capabilities that it urgently needs. 

Without it, the new executive is forced to act mostly through local governments. 

That just about works in wealthier places like the parts of the country that grow coffee, and Valle del Cauca. 

But Alberto in Chocó is yet to see it.