This week some of the world's richest donors and Europe's wealthiest businessmen gathered in Madrid with their Central American counterparts for a consultative group meeting planned to review the situation in Central America, two years after Hurricane Mitch devastated the region.
With hundreds of delegates already in session, the Spanish government called off the meeting as a mark of respect for the hundreds of Salvadorans killed by yet another earthquake.
The theme for the Madrid summit was: Central America - a fertile land of opportunities, and the main focus of the event was to move from aid to trade and show off the opportunities for renewed investment in an area desperate to access the global market. Ironically, El Salvador was to have been the showcase for the region, demonstrating the entrepreneurial spirit of this plucky country and its hard-working people.
Only weeks ago, El Salvador, anticipating its pivotal role as a motor of change in Central America, dollarised its economy and declared the euro a working currency. But all that was undermined when last weekend a 50second earthquake, measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale, shattered the illusion that reconstruction had been successful in Central America and that it was business as usual.
But it is not just mother nature that renders the region the most vulnerable in the Americas. Vulnerability to natural disasters in Central America is determined by mass poverty.
Hurricane Mitch killed more than 18,000 people and fewer than a handful of these were from middle-income families. Poverty is the killer, not nature.
After almost three decades of work in Central America, Trocaire has concluded that there are five variants which render people helpless in the face of natural disasters - none has to do with geography and all are man-made. These are lack of access to land, foreign debt, income inequality, ecological degradation and inadequate participation of civil society in the democratic process.
A lack of access to land is critical. Because of the gross inequality in the distribution of land, the poor are forced into destructive agricultural practices on marginal soils and poor land and to migrate to the cities, putting immense pressure on resources. While the average population density in El Salvador is 228 per sq km, some of the neighbourhoods in San Salvador flattened by the earthquake had a density of 11,000 people per km.
The crippling burden of foreign debt has deprived governments in the region of the resources needed to invest in social services, roads and other infrastructure which could save lives in time of crisis.
Throughout the Central American region efforts to eradicate poverty over the last decade have failed to tackle the problem of income inequality. The free-market policies warmly embraced by the governments of the regions and pushed by the key multilateral agencies and donor countries have ignored the growing evidence of concentration of income.
Structural adjustment, privatisation and other policies have generated a strongly regressive trend in income distribution. An official survey in Nicaragua in 1998, just weeks before Mitch, revealed that the poorest 20 per cent of families received a negligible 0.4 per cent of total income while the richest 20 per cent garnered an extraordinary 68 per cent of the same total.
On those kinds of incomes not surprisingly the poor construct homes of cardboard, rubbish and discarded materials that fall down with the first tremor or a mere blast of wind.
Despite the millions of pounds and huge energy invested in multiple conferences over the last 15 years dealing with the environment, the fact remains that in poor countries soil erosion, deforestation and pollution continue to increase. It will remain like that as long as there are low prices for primary agricultural products and protectionist measures blocking Central American exports to lucrative world markets.
A decent price for coffee - at an all-time low this year - or a lifting of the EU quota on Honduran bananas would mean the difference between being winners or losers for thousands of small farming families and plantation workers.
In the rush to reconstruct Central America after Mitch, all agreed that consolidating democracy with the active participation of civil society was a key goal. Without the involvement of citizens in scrutinising the use of reconstruction funds, the chances are that large amounts of aid simply fuel the corrupt practices and impunity which governments have failed to tackle.
Despite the electoral trappings of democracy, Central America has failed, a decade after ending its civil wars and military regimes, to construct effective democratic institutions capable of providing justice, protecting rights and delivering better livelihoods for the poor. For ordinary Central Americans, democracy has not yet paid off.
ONCE again this week the staff of Trocaire has begun the arduous task of distributing food and shelter materials to terrified families on the roadsides of El Salvador. Grateful as we are for the generous solidarity of Irish people willing to respond to the emergency, it will not be enough to end this vicious cycle of poverty and powerlessness.
The Madrid summit will reconvene in six weeks and European NGOs will have an opportunity to confront directly those with the kinds of resources that could make a difference. Among those participating will be the European Union, whose bureaucratic delays have failed to deliver funds committed two years ago for a Regional Reconstruction Programme for Central America.
Increased European public pressure is needed to ensure that promises and pledges made to the people of Central America two years ago will be honoured.
It is already too late for the people of San Augustin, Santa Tecla and Nueva Armenia but this is a timely reminder that as the rubble is cleared away our overriding goal has to be reducing social and ecological vulnerability. Political will and humanitarian aid are required for the daunting task of rebuilding lives on more solid structures of social justice.
Sally O'Neill is Trocaire's regional director for Central America, based in Honduras