Hungry Chileans ransack stores
Looters pillaged shops, homes and even attacked a fire station in the
burning Chilean city of Concepcion, as rescuers try to find quake
survivors.
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Police fired tear gas to try to disperse an angry crowd that set fire
to the Bigger supermarket after they were prevented from entering.
Black smoke billowed out over the ruins of Concepcion, one of the
cities worst hit by Saturday's 8.8-magnitude quake, which has killed
more than 720 people.
"It's full, they have water, food, diapers, but the police won't let
us go inside," complained one man standing next to the supermarket after
a curfew was extended Monday in a bid to stop theft and violence.
"It would be fine if they distributed things, or at least sold them
to us," grumbled Carmen Norin, 42.
The building's roof collapsed in the fire, injuring a volunteer
firefighter in the city of about 600,000, some 500 kilometers (310
miles) south of Santiago. One person who emerged screaming, covered in
flames, was rescued by the firefighters.
Another store was also set ablaze while other groups climbed atop
buses or looted abandoned houses.
"Here, people are even looting fire stations," sighed Conception fire
department chief Jaime Jara.
"We understand that people need to eat, but looting hospitals and
clinics... How can we serve our people?" he said.
One person was shot and killed and at least 160 were arrested for
violating the first curfew imposed in Chile since the end of Augusto
Pinochet's dictatorship in 1990.
Hundreds of troops were deployed to Concepcion alongside police as
part of President Michelle Bachelet's deployment of 7,000 soldiers to
the quake zone.
People raked through the ruins of supermarkets, taking everything
they could find.
"If they have basic foods, milk, flour, water, diapers for babies,
the order is to not arrest them," said Carlos Huerino, a police
inspector. "But if they have a television, they'll arrest them."
Bachelet declared a state of emergency Sunday and Concepcion was
placed under a curfew that was extended from 8:00 pm Monday until noon
Tuesday in a bid to restore order.
"Where they looted yesterday, there is nothing left. They took
everything in the supermarkets and the pharmacies," said a 55-year-old
cashier who declined to give her name.
At a dairy market, a man threw containers of milk from a balcony to
people below while others made off with sacks of flour.
But the crowd scattered as a truck mounted with a water cannon pulled
up along with an armored car and two buses carrying some 30 police in
riot gear and brandishing truncheons.
The first troops to arrive were generally welcomed by residents
desperate for a return to normalcy.
Amid the looting, rescue teams Monday night focused on the disaster
area around a 14-storey Concepcion apartment building that crumpled to
the ground in the quake.
With other residents still trapped, a father emerged alive from the
rubble of the building with his wife and two children and told of the
"indescribable" feeling of falling six floors and escaping unscathed.
"We just had our children in our arms and we fell. It's
indescribable. I said 'God, help us!'" Alex Tapia, an Ecuadoran sailor
renting an apartment with his wife Rosa Maria.
After the shaking stopped, the family were buried in the dark. They
clawed a tiny hole in a wall and Tapia shepherded his family through the
mangled apartment basement to a larger opening and to freedom.
CONCEPCION, AFP |