CONCEPCION, Chile — Four days after a deadly earthquake, Chile’s military finally launched a massive humanitarian aid effort Wednesday that promised to improve an image long associated with dictatorship-era repression.
However, its first delivery went to a neighborhood of military families who already had food.
Military officers who refused to give their names insisted their families were suffering too and that many soldiers have been working around the clock since the quake not knowing how their loved ones fared. Still, it was unclear who ordered the first food delivery to the military housing on General Novoa Avenue.
Army Cmdr. Antonio Besamat said local authorities controlled food distribution, with the armed forces providing only security.
Juan Piedra, of the National Emergency Office, said civilian officials report to the military under terms of the state of emergency declared by President Michelle Bachelet.
Some residents were angry not at the troops but at City Hall, which had announced Tuesday that none of the first relief shipments would go to neighborhoods inhabited by people who took goods from ruined stores. Many of those neighborhoods are Concepcion’s poorest.
“Aid has to reach those who have nothing first,” said Luis Sarzosa, 47, a heavy-equipment operator. “The well-off always get things first, and the people with nothing, they leave to the side.”
Added Marcela Sarzosa, a 44-year-old homemaker who lives in the Via Futuro slum: “I didn’t loot anything. Who’s going to help me?”
Survivors had cheered the troops’ arrival and the restoration of order in streets still littered with rubble, downed power lines and destroyed cars. Citizens’ applause — mixed with cries of “Finally!” — have soldiers proud of their role in keeping the peace, an unusual feeling for many in Chile’s armed forces during 20 years of democracy.
Since the bloody 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, many Chileans have preferred that soldiers stay inside their barracks. But police were overwhelmed when looting began after the quake, and Bachelet took the unprecedented step Sunday of declaring an emergency that turned 14,000 soldiers into peacekeepers.
Wednesday’s food was donated by the Lider Hipermart chain — a subsidiary of Wal-Mart — other businesses and the government.
Meanwhile, the distribution effort gathered steam.
C-17 transport planes were delivering more food and troops to Concepcion, and about 150 military trucks took food to a looted supermarket for distribution. Military helicopters ferried disaster aid from the city to smaller towns and villages along the Pacific coast that were destroyed by the tsunami. In nearby Talca, a field hospital was erected to relieve pressure on a quake-damaged hospital in Concepcion, and officials were distributing 17,000 meal rations.
Saturday’s magnitude-8.8 quake and tsunami ravaged a 435-mile stretch of Chile’s Pacific coast. The official death toll reached 802 on Wednesday.
