Mexican floodwaters recede; death toll and criticism mount

Floodwaters in Mexico’s hard-hit Tabasco state began receding Monday, as the number of dead or missing rose and criticism swelled over the government’s alleged failure to prevent and respond quickly to one of nation’s worst natural disasters.

More than a week after rain-swollen rivers in the region burst their banks, an estimated 20,000 people remained trapped on rooftops Monday.

Some media reports said 30 bodies had been recovered from the fetid water that has covered two-thirds of the state, swallowed tens of thousands of homes and displaced an estimated 1 million residents.

The local government, however, reported that 16 people were unaccounted for.

Rescuers on Monday reported finding some 100 homes buried by a mudslide in San Juan Grijalva, a village in neighboring Chiapas state.

In recent days the Mexican public has been horrified at televised images of desperate residents fighting over relief supplies and of sick, hungry victims packed into poorly equipped emergency shelters.

In Villahermosa, the capital of Tabasco state, shelter supervisor Hortensia Carmona spoke of appalling conditions at a school where 900 people have taken refuge.

“The authorities sent us only enough food for 300 people,” she told the newspaper Tabasco Hoy. “The situation is very serious. . . . There is no medicine. It’s terrible.”

Tabasco has been ravaged by flooding numerous times, including a 1999 inundation that claimed more than 600 lives.

Officials have been quick to blame torrential rains that have spawned massive flooding described by many as “biblical.” But critics said the crisis may have been made worse by human sources.

A number of media outlets in recent days have charged that state and local officials misspent resources earmarked for flood protection and continued to allow developers to build in high-risk zones.

“Criminal Negligence,” read a headline from the respected weekly magazine Proceso. “Tabasco Pays for Corruption,” read another from the national daily La Jornada.

President Felipe Calderon took a drubbing as well. Mexico’s chief executive has visited the disaster zone three times and sent 8,500 federal troops to the state, but some have denounced those troop levels as too low given the scale of the catastrophe.

Calderon has also taken heat for waiting until Sunday to announce that Mexico will accept foreign aid. Mexican politicians historically have been reluctant to accept such assistance, viewed as a way for outsiders to interfere in Mexico’s affairs.

The U.S. government on Monday pledged $300,000 to help flood victims; President Bush called Calderon to express sympathy and support.

Calderon’s political rivals, in contrast, vented their outrage.

Tabasco native Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the leftist who last year lost the presidency to the conservative Calderon by a narrow margin, called Monday for an investigation into a massive release of water from a federally managed hydroelectric dam in the region that helped swell the area’s river levels.

Civil defense officials said rivers in Tabasco have begun receding from record levels. But the immediate future of the impoverished state looks bleak. The region’s agricultural and commercial centers have been decimated.

Gov. Andres Granier said in a radio interview Monday that it could be three months before residents could return to their homes. “We hope when the waters recede we won’t find bodies inside the homes, like in New Orleans,” he said.

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marla.dickerson@latimes.com

Cecilia Sanchez and Maria Antonieta Uribe of The Times’ Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report. Times wire services were used in compiling this report.