Chile Military Delivers Aid, But 1st Helps Its Own

[Derechos]

CONCEPCION, Chile March 3, 2010, 06:29 pm ET
Four days after a deadly earthquake, Chile's military finally rolled out a massive humanitarian aid effort Wednesday that promised to improve an image long associated with dictatorship-era repression.

The dump trucks that soldiers spent all night helping fill with bags of food made their first deliveries in a neighborhood of military families who already had enough to eat.

After days of looting, rifle-toting troops occupied nearly every block of hard-hit Concepcion on Wednesday, enforcing a curfew that expired at noon with checkpoints throughout the city. With the streets more secure, they focused on aid.

Soldiers had worked overnight stuffing basics including flour, canned beans, cooking oil and tea into hundreds of plastic bags that volunteers loaded into dump trucks. Municipal workers then distributed the bags to survivors, many of whom had gone without fresh food or drinking water since Saturday's quake.

The convoy rolled minutes after the curfew expired — the first of many to deploy throughout the disaster area, army Lt. Col. Juan Carlos Andrades said.

Its first stop: A neighborhood inhabited by military families, next to army headquarters in Concepcion.

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