El Salvador - GFDRR

III. CROSS-CUTTING ISSUES | 99
C. FRAMEWORK FOR RECOVERY
Physical damages have been concentrated on the poorest families, due to the precarious nature of their
houses and to their location in informal settlements, especially those along riverbanks and on the dry
beds of old rivers and streams that, with the volumes of water produced by Ida, have filled again, leaving
destruction and death in their path.
The paralysis of productive activities has generated losses that have weakened the family economy
and, to the extent that productive assets are not replaced, the affected households will face a very severe
deterioration of their living conditions.
In terms of structuring the social network for recovery, the situation is different between larger cities
that are more closely linked to the national government’s sectoral actions, as may be the case of San
Salvador, and smaller cities where the community’s linkage is closer to and dependent on actions by local
governments. Moreover, in the former there are private agencies which, by seeking greater impacts, focus
their efforts on places where damages are greater or reach a larger population.
Furthermore, in larger cities, the fact that populations have lost their homes does not necessarily mean
that they have lost their livelihoods because they have kept their jobs or, since they are associated with
the job market, they can enter it.
It is a different case for affected populations of smaller cities or rural towns that have lost everything,
such as those analyzed in this section, in which the subsistence economy and the lack of linkage with
the market generate a high level of dependence on state efforts in general and on municipal efforts in
particular. However, the social perception is that “the municipalities are asleep, but the communities are
active and eager to undertake recovery efforts even without waiting for (or because they do not expect)
action by the State”. 44 In the zones visited by the mission, spontaneous efforts by the communities have
been reported; these communities have organized to remove debris and recover access roads. This is not
an isolated incident but rather a characteristic of the Salvadoran people, considered one of the most hard
working and enterprising in Central America.
If the spontaneous efforts carried out by the population can be adequately channeled with regard to
early recovery programs based on the hiring the victims themselves as labor 45 to carry out the works, these
may be the basis of a participatory, effective process with multiple effects:
1) The payment of daily wages to those affected who are hired as labor to carry out the works,
contributes directly and effectively to the recovery of the family economy and the reduction in
demands for humanitarian aid.
44
Interview with representatives of CARITAS and the Ministry of Agriculture in the Municipality of San Vicente.
45
In principle, unskilled labor is required to remove debris and carry out simple activities such as cleaning culverts, sewers
and drainage systems, but thought may be given to including the skilled labor that exists in the communities to carry out
small works such as the rehabilitation of culverts, sewers and small bridges, the channeling of rivers and streams, river
defense works, reinforcement of slopes, etc.