VICTIMIZATION IN NATURAL DISASTER

On 31st May 1970, the Peruvian coast and highlands north of Lima experienced a devastating earthquake which virtually leveled most communities in an area exceeding 80,000 km2 . The emergency which followed affected all survivors to some degree, but the worst conditions were generally found in urban centers. Smaller communities in this agricultural region did not escape the effects of the disaster, for the majority of adobe structures as many as 80% crumbled during the few moments of the earthquake. Even with destruction so widespread, however, the rural sector did not, as a whole, suffer the extremes of collective stress characterizing the larger towns and cities, so that some segments of the population in northcentral Peru were more victimized than others by the event and its repercussions. The Peruvian case is not unique in this respect. As in other natural disasters not all survivors were injured, nor did everyone lose family and friends. Unequal distribution of wealth, moreover, meant that some victims could better cope with some aspects of the emergency, while the greater number lost most of their personal possessions and faced a difficult struggle for survival and recovery. Despite such differences in kind and degree of victimization, a number of authors maintain that natural disasters tend to level the social order and to eliminate hierarchical distinctions because the dangers “indiscriminately affect persons of all groups and statuses” (Fritz, 1961). Drawing upon studies conducted primarily in industrialized countries, particularly in the US., analyses seem to reinforce the myth that crises bring out the best in people, with ‘best’ often defined in terms of the Western values of the authors themselves. Thus the social order is democratized by disaster conditions (Fritz, 1961; Quarantelli and Dynes, 1976) and this period of high esprit de corps is therefore not surprisingly called the post-disaster utopia, a term first used by Wolfenstein (1957) and appearing frequently in disaster literature. One can almost detect a note of moral order in Silone’s assertion that “an earthquake buries rich and poor, learned and illiterate, authorities and subjects alike beneath its ruined houses” (Silone, 1952). Death and destruction may be indiscriminate in some cases, but people are affected differently by the aftermath. Other authors have more recently recognized that natural disaster brings with it degrees of stress and need, but the assumption now seems to be that the poor are most victimized by destruction and by disruption of the affected sociocultural system. Westgate and OKeefe (1976), for example, believe that when an earthquake, flood or storm occurs the rural and urban poor “lose little because they have little to lose. But that which they do lose is probably all they have, Consequently, they lose all and because of this stay lost, with no hope of immediate or near-future recovery”. As with the ‘indiscriminately affected’ hypothesis, the ‘poor suffer most’ proposition is only partially correct. Effective response to disaster is in large part a function of the distribution of resources available within the stricken area or brought in by relief organizations. If those who control the flow of emergency supplies and services assume that all survivors suffer equally, then resources will be allocated in a more or less egalitarian fashion. In view of the fact that potential recipients of disaster aid do not suffer to the same degree or in the same way, an alternate procedure would be to distribute the relatively scarce supplies and services on the basis of need. Such a procedure requires a somewhat clearer definition of the concept ‘disaster victim’ than is currently found in literature. In this article I propose 4 categories of victims associated with the 1970 earthquake. Two groups, event and context victims, were in north-central Peru when the event occurred, while two other populations, peripheral and entry victims, were outside the stricken area on 31st May. I focus on conditions in 2 adjacent highland communities, Huaraz and Marian, which are located in the Andean valley known as the Callejon de Huaylas. Because the Peruvian case is in some ways unique, particularly in terms of the magnitude of the emergency, 1 cannot insist that the categories I discuss are applicable to all extreme situations. My purpose is to demonstrate the need to examine differential victimization in the disaster process and to recognize as possible victims persons outside the area of impact.