A Survivor's Story.(Amelia Shields Guirola survives El Salvador earthquake)(Brief Article)

Halfway up the slope, just to the west of a vast landslide that entombed hundreds of people, a white mansion stands unscathed. It is the home of Amelia Shields Guirola, a 78-year-old American-born widow who married into one of El Salvador's richest families six decades ago. When her walls began to shake on Jan. 13, Guirola was in the upstairs sitting room. She stood up and, leaning on her cane, carefully descended the spiral staircase.

People were dying around her, in one of the worst earthquakes to hit Central America in years, but Guirola knew nothing of its terrible toll. She went to the dining room to check on her china.

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 ...