María Victoria Chávez’s life came crashing down on her at 6:58 on Saturday evening.  Related: Ecuador earthquake rescue operation – in pictures  She had gone to the storeroom of the drugstore she ran in a four-storey building, which stood on a prominent corner of this provincial capital for 30 years. Then the earth shook and the building buckled.  The ground floor – which held a print shop, an internet cafe and the pharmacy – was swallowed by the earth, taking María Victoria, who was in her 30s, and a family of three with it.  The bodies of Junior Vera, 29, his wife Iliana Sánchez and their two-year-old son were pulled from the rubble on Sunday, a day after the magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck the coast of Ecuador, killing more than 400 people and wounding thousands.  “The parents were hugging the child between them,” said Miguel Cevallos, grandson of the building’s owners, who was present when the bodies were pulled from the wreckage.  But María Victoria’s body remained trapped for days.  “I could see her left leg,” said her uncle and godfather José Paul Chávez, who is a rescue worker. “But the rest of her body was crushed under the concrete,” he said, as he waited for a Venezuelan rescue team to extract her while hundreds of curious onlookers watched the recovery efforts.  Elivia Reyes, a neighbour of María Victoria, nervously clutched at her throat while remembering her friend. “I don’t say this just because she’s gone, but she was such a wonderful person. She would always recommend things for my aches and pains,” recalled Reyes. “Such a lovely girl.”  María Victoria was finally pulled from the rubble after rescuers cut a hole through concrete and steel bars, becoming one of the 413 confirmed deaths across a broad swath of Ecuador’s Pacific coastal region affecting cities such as Manta, Pedernales and others. The death toll was expected to continue to rise as efforts to rescue survivors turn into operations to recover bodies.  But even after more than two days since the earthquake, there were causes for joy. At least five people were rescued alive on Tuesday morning in Manta.  “We think everything is lost and our police … rescues five people alive today. Manta we will pull through,” the interior minister, José Serrano, tweeted on Tuesday. Local television station Ecuavisa reported that an additional person had been rescued at the same site and one of the survivors said another four people remained trapped inside.  In Portoviejo, Pablo Córdoba, 38, was rescued from the debris of what was once the six-storey El Gato hotel in the city centre on Monday. A Colombian rescue team located him after calling for any survivors to make some sort of noise. They heard banging, sawed through a concrete plaque and pulled the hotel receptionist out.  At the same time a sniffer dog roamed the wreckage of the Hotel Cabrera where the owner Raúl Cabrera was believed to be trapped. It was unknown whether he was still alive.  The scenes of devastation and destruction stretched from Esmeraldas province on the northern border with Colombia south to Manta and Portoviejo. In the seaside village of Bahía de Caráquez residents estimated that 75% of the homes had collapsed. Local news reports showed anguished survivors asking for aid and imploring rescue teams to find their loved ones.  The quake was the biggest to hit the country of 12 million in decades and levelled homes, hotels, government buildings and offices along the Pacific coast region. Electricity and water service was out in many areas. The government declared a state of emergency in six provinces.  In this city of 300,000, survivors scrambled for water and food while they awaited emergency supplies and rescue and recovery teams scoured the debris for survivors. Power lines were strewn across the streets and generators rumbled. Curious residents toured the centre of town on bicycles looking at the damage to their city.  Across the city centre, houses tilted into the cable-strewn streets, concrete blocks were turned to dust and cars were crushed under steel bars. Cars that had been parked at an auto dealer fell into a river.  Not even the Ecuadorian Red Cross building survived. Red Cross workers set up a makeshift operation centre in a parking lot across the street, organising aid efforts. “Almost the entire centre of town is destroyed,” said Jorge Vera, head of the provincial Red Cross committee. “And what hasn’t fallen is at risk of coming down with even the slightest aftershock.”  Ecuador’s Geophysics Institute reported 364 aftershocks since the quake on Saturday evening, with tremors registering a magnitude of 5.6 on Monday.  Despite those concerns, the hardest-hit area in this city has not been evacuated and aid has been slow in coming. For the past three nights, Richard Mejía and his neighbours have set up camp in an empty lot across the street from their homes, placing eight mattresses they were able to pull from the rubble under black plastic sheeting. More than 20 adults and children have slept here for three nights, with the men taking turns standing guard against looters and thieves.  They have received no emergency aid, they said. “Not one bottle of water, nothing,” said Mejía. While they waited for supplies, residents of Portoviejo stocked up in the few open shops on water, juices, bread and batteries.  Some 195 tonnes of food, clothing and other emergency supplies have been flowing in from the capital Quito and Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, the government said.  But Mejía complained that those who had been left homeless by the quake were told they must pick up supplies at the city airport, two miles out of town. “How are we supposed to get there and back? There is no transportation!  “I can’t believe that the government is not prepared for an emergency like this,” said Mejía, a municipal government worker.  Some 650 rescue workers have arrived from neighbouring countries to help with recovery efforts, according to foreign minister Guillaume Long. The US development agency USAid announced on Tuesday that it was sending a team of disaster experts to the country and offering $100,000 for emergency supplies. The UN refugee agency said it was preparing to airlift tents, sleeping mats, kitchen utensils and mosquito nets to the disaster-struck areas.  President Rafael Correa continued visiting the disaster zones on Tuesday. On Monday he said rebuilding costs would be in the billions of dollars, at a time when Ecuador’s oil-reliant economy is suffering from low petroleum prices.  “This city will never be what it was,” said César Velasco, a lifelong resident of Portoviejo. “And the country will take a long time to recover.”
In Portoviejo on the Pacific coast, one of the communities hit by Saturday’s quake, the dead are still being recovered and for survivors aid is slow in coming