1917 Guatemala earthquake

1917-1918 Guatemala earthquake

Guatemala City Cathedral after the earthquakes
Date November 1917, 09:01:43.3 UTC-6 to January 1918
Magnitude 5.6 (December 25th, 1917)
Depth 5 km
Type superficial

The 1917-1918 Guatemala earthquake was a sequence of tremors that lasted from November 17, 1917 thru January 24, 1918. They gradually increased in intensity until they almost completely destroyed Guatemala City and severely damaged the ruins in Antigua Guatemala that had survived the 1773 Guatemala earthquakes.

History

Inside of Guatemala City Cathedral after the earthquakes.

The seismic activity started on 17 November 1917 and ruined several settlements around Amatitlán. On December 25 and 29 of the same year, and on January 3 and 24 of the next, there were stronger earthquakes felt on the rest of the country, which destroyed a number of buildings and homes in both Guatemala City and Antigua Guatemala. Sometimes the movement was up and down, then sideways. And at every new shock a handful of houses went down as if they had been built of sand.[1] In most of the houses, walls cracked in two and then roofs fell in; in churches, bell towers crashed down, burying adjacent buildings and their occupants.[2]

Among those buildings destroyed by the earthquakes were a lot of the infrastructure built by general José María Reyna Barrios and president Manuel Estrada Cabrera, whose legacy has been forgotten by Guatemalans. The Diario de Centro América, a semi-official newspaper owned in part by President Estrada Cabrera, spent more than two months issuing two numbers a day reporting on the damage, but after a while, started critizing the central government after the slow and inefficient recovery efforts.[3] In one of its articles, it went as far as to tell that some holy Jesus images from the City had been saved because they had been taken away from their chruches after the first earthquake as they "did not want to stay anymore in a city where excessive luxury, impunity and terror were rampant".[3] Likewise, the newspaper complained that the National Assembly was issuing "excellent" laws, but nobody was "going by the law". [3] Finally, on its front page of May 1918, it complained that there was "still debris all over the city".[3] The Diario de Centro América itself was print in the rubble, in spite of which it was able to issue its two daily numbers.[4]

Guatemala City overview shortly before the 1917-1918 earthquakes, as it appeared in the French magazine L'Illustration on 12 January 1918.
There were also some macabre findings, like these mummies that came out of their tombs when those were broken by the earthquakes in La Merced Church.
How the Guatemala City general cemetery appeared before the earthquakes. It was completely destroyed and never regained its old splendor.

The French magazine L'Illustration on its January 12, 1918 issue[5] reports on a telegraph cable from December 31, 1917 that Guatemala city had been completely destroyed: two hundred thousand people was left homeless and there were about two thousand deaths. The magnificent monuments the city had were lost.[5] In 1920, Prince Wilhelm of Sweden arrived to Guatemala on a trip along Central America;[6] his journey took him to Antigua Guatemala and Guatemala City where he saw firsthand that the recovery efforts were still not done and the city lied still in ruins. There was still dust whirling in thick clouds, penetrating everywhere -clothes, mouth and nostrils, eyes and skin pores-; visitors got sick until they got used to the dust; the streets were not paved and only one in three houses was occupied, as the others were still in ruins.[1]

Public buildings, schools, churches, the theater, museums were all in the hopeless state of desolation in which they were left by the earthquake. Bits of roof hanged down the outsides of the walls and the footway was littered with heaps of stucco ornaments and shattered cornices. A payment of some hundred dollars would secure that a house that had been marked as unsecure with a black cross was then dimmed as done with its necessary repairs, allowing the owners to leave the houses empty and in ruins.[7] But it was at the cemetery that the utter devastation was most evident: all was demolished on the night of the earthquake and it was said that something like eight thousand dead were literally shaken from their graves, threatening pestilence to the city and forcing the authorities to burn all of them in a gigantic bonfire.[7] The dark cavities of the empty tombs were still opened in 1920 and no attempt had been made to restore the cemetery to its original condition.[7]

Finally, Prince Wilhelm, pointed out that the world had sent help in the form of money and goods, which arrived by shipload in Puerto Barrios, but neither helped the city because millions found their way to the President's treasury and his ministers sent provisions to Honduras and sold them there for a good profit.[8]

In an interview done in 1970, German literary critic Günter W. Lorenz asked 1967 Literature Nobel Laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias why he started writing; to his question, Asturios replied: «Yes, at 10:25 p.m of December 25, 1917, an earthquake destroyed my city. I remember seeing something like an immense cloud covering the moon. I was in a cellar, a hole in the ground or a cave, or something like that. Right there and then I wrote my first poem, a goodbye song to Guatemala. Later on I was really mad by the circumstances under which the rubble was removed and by the social injustice that became really apparent then».[9] This experience prompted Asturias to start writing when he was 18 years old; he wrote a tale called The policital beggars-Los mendigos políticos, which eventually became his most famous novel: El señor presidente.[10]

Gallery

See also: Guatemala City
Wikimedia Commons has media related to 1917-1918 Guatemala earthquake.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Prins Wilhelm 1922, p. 167.
  2. ↑ Princs Wilhelm 1922, p. 168.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Diario de Centro América 1918, p. Front page.
  4. ↑ Foro red boa 2012, p. 2.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Caverbel 1918, p. 48.
  6. ↑ Prins Wilhelm 1922, p. 167-179.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Prins Wilhelm 1922, p. 169.
  8. ↑ Prins Wilhelm 1922, p. 168.
  9. ↑ Lorenz 1994, p. 159-163.
  10. ↑ Himelblau 1973, p. 43-78.

Bibliography

Notes

    Coordinates: 15°19′12″N 89°06′00″W / 15.3200°N 89.1000°W