SANTIAGO, Chile — Most Chileans here in the capital are not satisfied with their government’s response to the devastating earthquake last month, saying the government of departing President Michelle Bachelet was late and inefficient in delivering aid and in re-establishing order, according to a poll published Sunday by a leading Chilean newspaper.
Natacha Pisarenko/Associated Press
President Michelle Bachelet visiting the city on Sunday.
The poll, by the daily newspaper El Mercurio, found that 72 percent of residents of the greater Santiago area believe the government’s efforts to restore order came too late and were inefficient, and 48 percent said they thought Ms. Bachelet had delayed taking action because she did not want to end her term by sending the military into the streets.
Since the 8.8-magnitude quake and tsunami struck on Feb. 27, Ms. Bachelet has come under a storm of criticism for her government’s handling of the quake, which devastated a large section of the south-central portion of the country and left at least 452 people dead.
The president waited 36 hours to declare areas hardest hit by the quake “catastrophe areas,” a move that allows the military to take over the disaster zones and institute nighttime curfews of darkened streets.
Without the military present, widespread looting and vandalism occurred in Concepción and other areas in the two to three days after the quake. And aid was initially slow in arriving, with residents in coastal towns just south of Concepción still complaining three days after the quake that they had yet to receive a single shipment of food or water.
“The president deserves a lot of the blame,” Carlos Sirva, 78, a Concepción resident, said Thursday. “She didn’t give the order to the soldiers, because she thought that people would feel like it was 1973 all over again. How ridiculous could she be?”
Ms. Bachelet leaves office this week after a four-year term in which she achieved one of the highest approval ratings ever recorded for a Chilean president, topping 80 percent in recent polls. But her handling of the quake may leave a stain on her legacy that could affect the prospects of her coalition returning to power in four years.
Sebastián Piñera, a billionaire businessman due to be sworn in Thursday, will be the first right-wing president to lead Chile since the dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet stepped down in 1990. Ms. Bachelet, 58, was expected to be a strong contender if she chooses to seek another term in 2014. Chile’s Constitution does not allow consecutive terms in office.
Ms. Bachelet has denied that there was any delay on her part, telling The New York Times in an interview on Saturday that she did her best in a crisis of unprecedented magnitude given the failed communication systems and collapsed bridges.
She dismissed accusations, including by some members of her cabinet, that she delayed sending in the military because of her own experience as a political prisoner during the military dictatorship as “speculation that has nothing to do with reality.” She said she had no problems, ideological or otherwise, deploying the military when needed.
An aid official, Andres Vera of the Christian charity World Vision, defended the government’s response, saying that because of electric and cellphone breakdowns, no one knew at first the scale of the devastation.
“It seemed the operations were slow, but in reality they didn’t have the information about where to go and how severe the situation was in different areas,” he said. “But once the information started to flow we started to see an amazing response from the government and the military.”
Since the initial lag, the government has rolled out a massive relief effort, deploying planes, ships, helicopters and trucks and more than 10,000 troops to deliver tons of aid. Chilean Air Force planes are landing every half-hour in Concepción to deliver aid.
The quake and tsunamis that followed destroyed at least 500,000 homes, but the figure could reach 1.5 million once surveys are complete, Housing Minister Patricia Poblete said.
A 25-hour national telethon that ended Saturday collected $59 million, twice what organizers set as their goal, but Chile will need much more. Some estimates have put reconstruction cost estimates at up to $30 billion. Finance Minister Andres Velasco has said that Chile may tap some of its more than $11 billion in copper profits from the state-owned Codelco mining company.
The El Mercurio face-to-face survey of 600 adults was conducted in the Santiago area on Thursday and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points. In addition, polls conducted in one day may have additional error.
