If a similar earthquake happened in Europe, there would be victims, but not the number that we've experienced here. The same thing is true for the recent earthquake in India. Along with floods and droughts and volcanic eruptions, earthquakes are part of our daily reality. They only become disasters when they encounter our vulnerability that's rooted in marginalization, exclusion, and environmental abuse. Thus, he argued, it commits the same errors with every new disaster.
History repeats itself.
These phenomena surprise the government with no contingency plan or real preparation, so it always reacts with a bureaucratic, inefficient, centralized, and assistentialist program, putting politicking first and responding in a way that excludes people rather than take into account the participation of people at the grassroots. Ibarra helped draft new legislation governing the prevention and mitigation of disasters. Introduced in the country's Legislative Assembly last year, it hasn't emerged from a legislative committee, despite public demonstrations outside the parliament by the bill's supporters last June and October. Ibarra also led a valiant but equally futile struggle to stop construction on the hills above Santa Tecla just outside the capital, hills that in January came tumbling down on the middle-class Las Colinas neighborhood below, killing hundreds. The neighborhood had been built underneath a hill, part of the Cordillera del Balsamo, a mountain range that cuts across the country, providing a source for 22 rivers, cleaning the air of the capital city, and providing a key link in the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor.