Authorities deal with earthquake victims

SANTA TECLA, El Salvador – As the death toll in El Salvador's devastating earthquake topped 600 and kept climbing, authorities made a last futile push to find trapped survivors yesterday and then shifted to coping with the growing number of corpses.

Workers were burying unidentified bodies in common graves at the municipal cemetery in this devastated town, and the government said 3,000 coffins requested from Colombia would arrive soon. By afternoon, bulldozers began to plow through the dirt, recovering bodies and removing debris.

Finger-pointing began: In Santa Tecla, where a mountainside buried a whole neighborhood, environmental activists and authorities said deforestation contributed to the disaster.

Residents of the buried neighborhood, Las Colinas, had pleaded with Congress and the Supreme Court to block the construction of mansions on the hillside above them, saying the lack of ground cover left those below vulnerable to landslides. Their pleas were ignored and construction continued.

Saturday's 7.6-magnitude quake loosened that hillside, sending dirt raining on the homes below and bringing down some of the mansions. Angry residents argued Monday that the development had caused hundreds of deaths.

"What good does money do us if we are subjecting our children to something like this?" Santa Tecla Mayor Oscar Ortiz asked.

Ecologist Ricardo Navarro accused members of Congress and government officials of negligence for failing to stop the deforestation.

"Several urbanization projects were born ... and there you have the results, hundreds of deaths," he said.

In Santa Tecla yesterday, rescuers cleared the area where the mountainside buried the neighborhood. In the silence, Taiwanese technicians with heartbeat detectors and Spanish rescuers with sniffer dogs combed the area.

They found no signs of life, and the bulldozers and earthmovers began to plow through the rubble, recovering bodies and removing debris. Hundreds of bodies were still believed to be buried there.