A City Dies in a Circle of Fire

A City Dies in a Cicle of Fire

Managua, Nicaragua is a beautiful

town, You buy a hacienda for a few pesos

down...

MANAGUA was never quite as idyllic as the pop hit of the postwar 1940s made it out to be. Until last week, Nicaragua's capital (pop. 400,000) was a city of sharp contrasts: of wood and tin shacks in the crowded downtown slums, of office towers and modern middle-class apartments along Avenida Central, of sprawling homes and haciendas owned by the rich atop the low volcanic hills on the city's outskirts. As Christmas 1972 approached, the main preoccupation of the city's relaxed, resilient and notably hospitable people was the 20th Amateur Baseball World Series, in which the local team had finished in a second-place tie with the U.S. entry, behind the vaunted Cubans. The home-team success added a special giddiness to the Criteria, the 24-hour binge of parties, street dancing and fireworks that rocks the city every year as the Christmas holidays begin.

But this time, much more was to rock Nicaragua's carefree capital. In less than two hours of violent seismic shocks two days before Christmas the city was virtually destroyed. At least 20,000 people were injured. Perhaps 6,000 or so dead were carted to mass graves and buried under the falling rubble that had killed them in the city's devastated center; many corpses were cut open, doused with gasoline and set afire in the streets where they had fallen, in order to prevent contamination.

In the days that followed the disaster, as those who stayed behind in a city without water, electricity or food fought among themselves and with authorities for survival, the geological tragedy became a human one. Shooting broke out frequently between troops and bands of looters who roamed the savaged city. Emergency hospitals set up to care for quake victims treated at least 32 Managuans for bullet wounds. In a radio broadcast, General Anastasio ("Tachito") Somoza, 47, the strongman head of the family that has ruled Nicaragua for more than 30 years, despairingly said that his capital's biggest immediate problem was not hunger or the threat of disease but the "abominable beings" scouring the dead city.

There have been many more tragic earthquakes in this century (see box, page 27). Nonetheless the destruction of a capital, millions of dollars in physical damage and an immeasurable toll in human capacity and aspirations would necessarily have a traumatic impact on Nicaragua, a nation of 2,000,000.

As many of its older survivors knew from firsthand experience, Managua was disaster-prone. In 1885 and again in 1931, the city was virtually leveled by quakes, with heavy loss of life (some 1,450 died in the 1931 catastrophe). Lying along the "circle of fire," a ring of volcanoes and seismic fault lines that encircles the Pacific from the Aleutians down through the western rim of the Americas to New Zealand and up through Japan, Central America is frequently shaken by geologic turbulence.

Managua, situated atop a volcanic belt in a highly active area, is particularly vulnerable. As seismologists gauge them, the pre-Christmas tremors were not particularly severe, measuring just 6.3 on the Richter scale (only quakes that hit 7.5 or higher are considered "major"; shocks of similar intensity occur frequently in Central America but go unreported). Apparently, Managua's fatal misfortune was that it sat at or near the exact epicenter of an unusually "shallow" quake that occurred only about nine miles below the surface of the earth. The city, built on compacted volcanic debris rather than solid rock, reacted to its force with special violence.

The first tremors woke the sleeping city shortly after 11 p.m. The shocks continued growing in intensity over the next hour; clocks all over Managua stopped at 12:27. There were as many tales of terror as there were survivors. One Managua housewife who escaped from her collapsed home, Ana de Franco, 66, credited the wall that fell in on her with saving her life; it prevented her from being crushed by the roof, which came down with much more force.

General Somoza and his American wife Hope had just come home from a wedding party in a nearby suburb when the earth lurched under their ranch-type house in Managua's El Retire section. "We got up and ran to an alley," he told TIME'S Jay Mallin. "Something knocked against Hope and bruised her arm and ankle. Then came another tremor and another. The first one oscillated horizontally, and that gave some people time to get out of their homes. The second and third oscillated up and down. That third one was the killer. We thought we were pieces of ice in a cocktail shaker."

The Presidential Palace on the south edge of the city was heavily damaged. The roof of the 9th-floor restaurant atop the modern Hotel Intercontinental bounced four feet up in the air, then came down with a crash; the hotel guests, among them Billionaire Recluse Howard Hughes (see PEOPLE), quickly evacuated the building.

Downtown Managua became a scene out of Dante. Near the Lake Managua shore front, the earth opened to swallow buildings, Jeeps, everything. All of the stores, restaurants, offices and lower-and lower-middle-class homes within a two-mile radius of Avenida Central, the main shopping street, were destroyed or damaged. Masonry structures collapsed on their occupants; wooden ones, tinder-dry after a long drought, burst into flames.

Utter Chaos. Carmela Lacayo, 29, an American teacher and former nun who had been visiting her cousin at his home just outside the city, rushed downtown to help. There, she told TIME, she found a scene of "utter chaos: people running in the streets screaming, others digging frantically, trying to unearth trapped relatives, still others ripping up their pajamas to use as bandages. One young mother walked in the street clutching her dead baby to her chest while her husband strode zombie-like at her side." Next day, the city was under a pall of smoke and red dust. Thousands of refugees crowded the highways, carrying what belongings they had been able to save. Surveying the damage, as vultures circled over a 320-block wasteland that had been designated a "contaminated area," Lieut. Colonel Jose Alagret, commander of Nicaragua's army engineers, said sadly, "This is a city that was, but is no more."

Overlaying the natural tragedy were varying degrees of human confusion, venality and selfless generosity. Hoping to force out the 150,000 or so who stubbornly refused to leave Managua, and thus reduce the chances of an outbreak of disease, the government at first refused to bring food into the city. As a result, emergency food supplies flown in by various relief organizations piled up in hangars at Managua's Las Mercedes Airport while profiteers within the city sold bread at $2 a loaf and water and soft drinks at $2 a bottle (the water in Lake Managua is too polluted to drink). Children sat in the streets, putting their hands in mud puddles and then licking the moisture. Rioting broke out among a mob of hungry survivors when a supermarket owner threw open his doors.

Within hours after the quake struck, however, bread and milk powder from CARE were arriving at Las Mercedes. President Nixon ordered "an all-out effort" and U.S. Air Force C-141 and C-5 transports shuttled in with medical supplies, bulldozers and other items at a tonnage rate that exceeded the first days of the Berlin airlift of 1948. At least 20 countries joined the relief effort, including Cuba, which dispatched a medical team.

Even as Managua still smoldered, the Somoza regime began pondering reconstruction. Money posed no great problem; the Nixon Administration, which is anxious to burnish Washington's tarnished image in Latin America, would almost certainly be eager to help bankroll the building of a new capital. But where? Managua was now a three-time loser, it was true, but Leon, the country's second city (pop. 50,000), also lies in an earthquake zone.

There was no doubt as to who would make the final decisions. Earthy Tachito Somoza, whose only title at present is National Guard commander, had stepped down from the presidency last May and turned his powers over to a figurehead three-man junta only because he could not succeed himself under the Nicaraguan constitution. He had planned to stay on the sidelines until late 1974, when he would run for a second certain five-year term as President. Now, with his country in crisis, it seemed likely that the strongman would be flexing his muscles a lot sooner.

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