The tale of Guirola’s survival while more than 700 others died–many of them middle class and a few newly affluent, caught in the landslide below her–is also a story of El Salvador’s tragic modern history. Until 1979, when leftist guerrillas began fighting a civil war against the U.S.-backed government, 14 families owned most of El Salvador’s land. They ran the country as their private fiefdom. Amelia Guirola, like her mansion on the hill, is a symbol of those days. Everything destroyed in the landslide just outside the capital of San Salvador was once a coffee plantation owned by Guirola’s aristocratic Salvadoran husband.
As a young woman from a well-to-do American family, Amelia found herself on vacation in Central America in the mid-1940s. In Guatemala, she met Eduardo Guirola, manager of his father’s real estate there. Amelia and Eduardo fell in love, got married and eventually returned to his native El Salvador. Resentful of the Guirola wealth, many poor Salvadorans came to believe that the family’s ancestors had sold the souls of future generations to the Devil. In fact, the ancestors were rich colonialists from Spain. They raised cattle and grew cotton, indigo and coffee.
They also liked big houses. Amelia recalls that her husband had planned to build the mansion to the east of where it now stands–which would have placed it in the landslide. But a worker advised him that the ground there was too loose. The slope above, a family coffee farm sheltered by forest, was so steep in places that coffee pickers often had to anchor themselves to trees. The couple spared no expense on the house. They hired an architect from Sewickley, Pennsylvania, Amelia’s home town. They imported French furniture and marble from England for a faux fireplace. And they paid an engineer to make the house earthquake-safe.
But Guirola’s life was not all fairy tale. In 1958, the same year she renounced her U.S. citizenship, her husband died at the age of 38 in a car accident in Paris. Then in 1980, at the beginning of El Salvador’s 12-year civil war, her eldest son, 33-year-old Eduardo, was kidnapped and killed. “Ever since then I haven’t been able to cry,” she says. (Nobody was arrested in the murder.) The same year her family lost tens of thousands of acres when the government redistributed land. Now Guirola employs 30 people–cooks, gardeners, maids, a laundrywoman, a driver, office workers, sculptors and bodyguards.
Her family started selling more property in the 1980s. First, her two children turned their coffee plantation into a housing development at the base of the hill. They sold about 450 houses for about $8,000 each, mostly to merchants, Army officers and other middle-class Salvadorans. A decade later a developer, Roberto Pimentel, bought land just above the newly build neighborhood for $400,000. He planned to construct 24 luxury houses, each valued at about $170,000. Three were already built and occupied when the earthquake struck, and two others were under construction. Fifteen of Pimentel’s workers were killed in the landslide.
Soon after the Jan. 13 quake, Guirola strolled to her balcony. “Instead of watching my workers play soccer in the parking area”–her usual Saturday activity–“I was watching people digging for bodies,” she said. “I felt so sorry for them.” Meanwhile, not even her telephone service was disrupted. A friend called and invited her for lunch. With four of her servants and two police officers, she walked down the landslide, past the parents calling out for their buried children, to a waiting car. She now lives with her daughter, but hopes to soon return to the mansion.Damage there appeared minimal last week: a dirt-filled pool, some loose bricks and lots of broken china.
