Chile earthquake: 'Looters run wild'? Not quite.

Preventive measures

Yet the move to dispatch troops is seen more as a preventive measure, than a reaction to a situation out of hand.

“Whenever you have looting, such as [during] Hurricane Katrina, there is a perception that the government has lost control,” says Patricio Navia, a Chilean columnist and professor at New York University. For the most part, he says, “this is not looting of people hungry and in need of water… This is not a hungry crowd that wants to feed itself. It was partly looting of people taking advantage [of the situation]. My perception is that the situation is much more under control than the media here presents it.”

On Monday, the nation still struggled to reach some of the outlying areas, with infrastructure making passage impossible in some parts of the country. Rescue crews worked without stop to save those still under rubble.

Mr. Navia says that the government delayed deploying the military by a day, in part because initial assessments showed a situation under control. The delay also speaks to the nation’s military past under right-wing strongman Augusto Pinochet. “There was a dictatorship shadow that prevented [the government] from getting the military on the streets. Normally you’d send the Army out to patrol and [maintain] order.”

By Sunday, however, the death toll had doubled to more than 700 and many remote towns were obviously desperate for help.

Now that troops are on the streets, he expects the situation to remain under control.

A sense of calm was already the prevailing mood in most of Santiago, which was not hit as hard by the earthquake but still suffered its share of destruction, and is as traumatized as the rest of the nation.

Still, Carmen Medina, whose house was destroyed in Santiago, says she worries about security, especially about people ransacking the belongings left in her home. “One always looks at other countries, [in continents] such as Africa, and says ‘how terrible.’ But now we are living this,” she says. “We are experiencing delinquency. [We need to be] protecting our own homes and the things we have.”

IN PICTURES: Images from the 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Chile

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