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 Praying for miracles, desperate family members beseeched rescue
teams to find their missing loved ones as they dug through the
debris of flattened homes, hotels, and stores in the hardest-hit
Pacific coastal region.
In Pedernales, a devastated rustic beach town, crowds gathered
behind yellow tape to watch firemen and police sift through rubble
into the night. The town's soccer stadium was serving as a makeshift
relief center and a morgue.
"Find my brother! Please!" shouted Manuel, 17, throwing his arms up
to the sky in front of a small corner store where his younger
brother had been working when the quake struck on Saturday night.
When an onlooker said recovering a body would at least give him the
comfort of burying his sibling, Manuel yelled: "Don't say that!"
 But for Manuel and hundreds of other anxious Ecuadoreans with
relatives missing, time was running out.
As of Tuesday, rescue efforts would become more of a search for
corpses, Interior Minister Jose Serrano told Reuters. The death toll
stood at 413, but was expected to rise.
The quake has injured at least 2,600 people, damaged over 1,500
buildings, and left 18,000 people spending the night in shelters,
according to the leftist government.
Visiting the disaster zone on Monday, a moved President Rafael
Correa said rebuilding would cost billions of dollars and may
inflict a "huge" economic toll on the OPEC nation of 16 million
people. CRUSHED BODIES
In many isolated villages or towns struck by the quake, survivors
struggled without water, power, or transport. Rescue operations
continued, but the sickly, sweet stench of death told them what they
were most likely to find.
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"There are bodies crushed in the wreckage and from the smell it's
obvious they are dead," said army captain Marco Borja in the small
tourist village of Canoa.
"Today we brought out between seven and eight bodies."
Nearly 400 rescue workers flew in from various Latin American
neighbors, along with 83 specialists from Switzerland and Spain, to
boost rescue efforts. The United States said it would dispatch a
team of disaster experts while Cuba was sending a team of doctors.
To finance the costs of the emergency, some $600 million in credit
from multilateral lenders was immediately activated, the government
said.
Ecuador also announced late on Monday that it had signed off on a
credit line for $2 billion from the China Development Bank (CDB) to
finance public investment. China has been the largest financier of
Ecuador since 2009 and the credit had been under negotiation before
the quake.
(Writing by Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
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