‘A Memory Not to Be Erased’ : 1 Year Later, Scars of Mexico Quake Linger

The morning was uncommonly clear and promised warmth and sunshine. In the ward for newborn babies on the sixth floor of Mexico City’s Juarez Hospital, Sara Valencia’s metal crib started a sudden, irregular rocking.

Juan Jose Hernandez Cruz, a medical intern, arrived late and breathless at the hospital’s third floor for his morning rounds. A slight rattling of the windows in a patient’s room distracted him momentarily, but he was more worried about his supervisor’s reaction to his tardiness.

At an apartment building called Nuevo Leon, Gustavo Barrera, a retired army engineer, turned on the morning television news. At the same instant, he sensed the floor move beneath him. His thoughts flashed to the building’s unsteady foundation, which over the years had caused the structure to tilt northward.

Bus Shivered

Marcos Zarinana, a traveling plastic notions salesman, arrived by bus at the outskirts of Mexico City, an hour away from his home in Cuautla. When Zarinana felt the bus shiver, he thought it was simply a rough gear change. Then he saw that traffic had stopped and pedestrians were steadying themselves against trees and lampposts.

It was 7:19 a.m., Sept. 19, 1985, and the Mexico City earthquake had begun. In a matter of minutes, thousands of lives would be lost and thousands more would be transformed by tragedy.

Now, almost a year later, Mexico City, the world’s most populous metropolis, is still recovering from the uncoiled sorrow of sudden death and destruction.

Scars remain on the landscape and in the minds of survivors. The memory of terror and of the loss of family and friends has yet to fade. Suspicions linger that faulty construction, as well as cruel nature, contributed to the tragedy.

The Mexican government, seeking to overcome criticism of its slow initial response to the disaster, boasts now of having resolved many quake-caused problems even as, officially, it plays down the casualty figures.

The earthquake, which was followed by a weaker aftershock a day later, left at least 10,000 dead.

“It affected us all deeply, morally, in our feelings,” Rufino Tamayo, the Mexican painter, said in an interview. “It is a memory not to be erased.”

It is a memory very much alive for Juan Jose Hernandez Cruz, the intern.

As the quake gathered strength and shook Juarez Hospital, Hernandez Cruz stayed with a panicked patient. Then he heard the floors above him collapse with a loud slap.

Hernandez Cruz fell backward into a violent darkness. For a moment, there was silence, then cries and calls; then came tears and desperation. He reached out and felt a hand nearby quickly turning cold.

He tried to calm a patient named Leonardo, trapped nearby in the jumbled maze. Leonardo, who was in the hospital recovering from an accidental bullet wound, cursed the day that he ever entered the building.

Beneath a broken beam, Hernandez Cruz lost all sense of time. He slept and awoke and slept some more. He quenched his thirst by drinking his own urine, collecting it in an unbroken flask he found in the debris around him. He persuaded Leonardo not to slash his wrists with a scalpel. Conversations with some other entombed voices ceased forever.

It was four days before rescuers pulled Hernandez Cruz out of the remains of Juarez Hospital. His rescue by French firefighters flown in to help with the emergency was witnessed on television around the world; his cry of pain and release symbolized Mexico City’s agony.

A Recurring Nightmare

In the year since the quake, Hernandez Cruz, 24, has yet to fully recover from either his physical or mental wounds. His left hand is numb from a severed nerve. A finger on his right hand failed to heal properly from surgery to close a severe gash. Both injuries are important to Hernandez Cruz’s future: He wants to be a surgeon.

He hopes that pending surgery will cure the nerve numbness.

Hernandez Cruz also suffers from a recurring nightmare.

“I am in a room with everyone I love--my parents, my girlfriend,” he said, recounting the dream. “Suddenly, there is a shaking and everything goes dark. And I am alone.”

Two months of psychiatric treatment have made the dream less frequent. But Hernandez Cruz is still afraid to enter tall buildings, and he rarely leaves his family’s home in the town of Nezahualcoytl to go downtown. Sometimes, at his new internship at a hospital in Texcoco, a community on the capital’s outskirts, he imagines that the building moves.

“I grab the wall. My colleagues laugh,” he said. “Their laughter doesn’t anger me. It is like I have been to a special school. I understand something they don’t.

“It will become just a memory someday, I suppose. I don’t want to be different. I just want to be a doctor.”

In the first hours and days after the quake, with no swift and organized rescue effort by the government, the selflessness of brigades of volunteers saved many lives and provided the first comfort to the hurt and homeless.

One of the daring volunteer rescuers was Marcos Zarinana, the traveling salesman.

Zarinana had come to the capital that day to go shopping. As the shaking abated, his bus continued on to downtown. Near the Tasquena subway stop, two hotels, the Finisterre and the Montreal, had collapsed. Once trained in first aid by the Red Cross, Zarinana began to help pull bodies from a partially crushed coffee shop at the Finisterre.

Then he borrowed a Red Cross patch and helped to evacuate patients from the heavily damaged Centro Medico, Latin America’s largest medical facility. From there he went to the Conalep Technical School, where, after much digging and bodily contortions, he entered the ruins and pulled out three bodies.

Later, Zarinana took a bus back to Cuautla. His wife told him that she had seen him on television, comforting a busboy at the Finisterre.

Exploits of ‘The Flea’

Zarinana recruited three friends, and the next day they returned to Mexico City. There he spent a week plunging through nearly impassable ruins to rescue stranded victims. His childhood nickname, “The Flea,” became a household word in the capital as television interviewers and newspaper reporters trumpeted his exploits again and again.

Zarinana, 43, skinny and agile, recalled recently how he clambered over corpses to reach trapped students in the Conalep ruins, patients in Juarez Hospital and residents of numerous collapsed tenements.

“I thank God for the little body He gave me,” Zarinana said.

To the desperate, Zarinana became something of a magician.

“People came up to me, offering me money. They said, ‘Flea, get my daughter out,’ or ‘Flea, my wife is in there,’ ” he remembered.

Even now, tears fill his eyes as he recalls the many victims he could not save.

“Most of the time, I could do nothing,” he said.

In the last year, Zarinana has received numerous awards and rewards: certificates and diplomas, $500 from the governor of Queretaro state, $1,000 from the governor of his home state, Morelos.

The Morelos government also gave him a job as a traffic policeman that pays about $200 a month. In Mexico, a steady income, however modest, is considered a blessing.

His fame also attracted envy.

“People think riches rained down on me. They say the government gave me a house. They think I have a Swiss bank account,” he said. “All lies.

“You would think that the earthquake would wipe away greed and rapacity. No!” he added with some anger.

The survivors of the Nuevo Leon apartment building blame greed and rapacity in part for the disaster that overtook them last Sept. 19.

Since the quake, construction experts have said that evasion of construction codes led to the collapse of many buildings. Engineers have pointed out that many steel reinforcement rods embedded in support columns were substandard and frail. Others have alleged that low-quality cement was used in some buildings. Charges have circulated that corruption, especially in the construction of government buildings, made heavy damage inevitable.

Such attention centered on the disaster at the Nuevo Leon, part of a 102-structure government housing complex built in the 1960s.

The Nuevo Leon, whose problems of instability were already obvious, was unable to withstand the earth’s shaking on Sept. 19. Two of its sections tumbled into a stack of concrete.

Gustavo Barrera, the retired army engineer who lived on the 10th floor of the 14-story building, barely had time to yell to his neighbors to place themselves under door frames for protection before he was tossed against a column as the building collapsed. He saw a brilliant light, lost consciousness and dreamed that he was dead.

A Running Battle

When he came to, Barrera made a mental inventory of his body: one foot, in pain; the other, trapped; arms free, chest and head uninjured. Rescued hours later, dazed, covered in dust and bleeding from the wounds to his feet, Barrera hobbled to a medical tent for treatment. Then, despite the injuries, he returned to the ruins of his home and joined in the rescue efforts. Mostly, he pulled out bodies to join a growing, blanket-covered line on the sidewalk.

For seven years, the tenants of Nuevo Leon had fought a running battle to prod the building’s government owners to reinforce its foundation, weakened by previous, milder quakes. The building leaned precariously.

Residents’ groups and the government haggled over projects to strengthen the base, as well as over payment for periodic adjustments of structural jacks that were supposed to keep the building level. The jacks were supposed to have been adjusted every two months. But according to Barrera, they had not been inspected since sometime in 1984.

He and other residents resisted attempts to make the tenants responsible for adjusting the jacks. Now, he is pressing for criminal prosecution of the building administrators.

Tenants Complained

“The government tried to pass the responsibility to us. But we were only tenants. The government was the landlord,” he said in a recent interview.

Just four weeks before the quake, the Nuevo Leon residents’ association wrote a letter to the government’s Popular Housing Development Agency complaining that the stabilizing jacks had been left unmaintained and that the building was tilting dangerously.

“Some people said we were being alarmist. I thought at the time, ‘God, I hope I’m wrong,’ ” recalled Barrera, 51, who has since moved to an adjacent building.

After the collapse of the Nuevo Leon, the government announced an investigation. Nothing has been heard of that probe since, other than that it continues.

“It’s a complicated matter,” said Jorge Gamboa, an official of the city’s housing department. “Who can be blamed over the collapse of a building 20 years old?”

The same rationale met complaints that Juarez Hospital was inadequately repaired after a 1981 earthquake and that other government and private buildings were built with substandard material.

Barrera said he will persist in efforts to have those responsible punished. “God gave me a second life, and I want to use it to seek justice,” he said.

He has collected debris from Nuevo Leon as proof of building negligence. He recently showed a reporter chunks of cement reinforced with large rocks instead of the required small pebbles--a sign, he said, of cost-cutting.

Graffiti on wood fences surrounding the site of the demolished Nuevo Leon expresses some of the anger.

“Punishment for the murderers,” one writer urged.

The lack of visible progress on prosecuting alleged construction crimes is matched by the lack of progress on other promised reforms.

Last year, it was presumed that the quake provided a stark lesson about the sins of uncontrolled growth in Mexico City, a sort of divine retribution for the population explosion, the clogged traffic, the pollution and cement overgrowth that is choking Mexico’s capital.

The government of President Miguel de la Madrid was quick to aver that the lessons were taken to heart: Building codes would be reviewed; violations of construction standards exposed in the skeletal remains of buildings would be punished; a long-discussed decongestion of the city center would begin, with ministries, offices and industries forced to the provinces. To reduce downtown crowding, parks would replace the vacant lots where many buildings had fallen or been demolished.

Unfulfilled Promises

Except for steps to revamp the building codes, the other promises have gone largely unfulfilled and appear to be dead letters.

“The earthquake, for all its tragedy, was insufficient to derail the city’s march to ecological destruction,” said Alfonso Cipres Villareal, an architect and environmental activist.

The much-heralded dispersal of government buildings from downtown is apparently not going to take place.

“Residents of many districts where ministries have taken temporary quarters complain that their tranquility was disrupted,” said Roberto Campa, technical adviser to the city’s reconstruction committee.

Nor, he added, is there much hope that industries will relocate: “The reality is that Mexico City is a big market. Who wants to move from their customers?”

The promised creation of “green space” on vacant lots also came to naught. Parks created soon after the first rubble was cleared away have been fenced off and put up for sale by their owners. Although the government expropriated land for housing, officials considered taking land for parks too radical an approach to urban redevelopment, Campa said.

The government did, however, buy the downtown site of the Regis Hotel, which crumbled in flames on the day of the earthquake. It was converted into a park that will be inaugurated Friday.

Project Taking Life

One longtime project does appear to be taking on life: Campa said that traffic will be barred from much of Mexico City’s old core.

Moreover, housing there will be upgraded to conform with new building standards, and damaged hospitals are being rebuilt on firmer ground on the outskirts of town, he said. Any new construction in the city will carry a permanent plaque bearing the names of contractors and inspectors, he said.

Studies for the new building codes have progressed during the last year, and the results are expected to be announced next month.

The codes are important because earthquake experts have attributed many of the building collapses to inadequacies of the old codes. Many of the damaged buildings were irregularly shaped, in “L” configurations, and broke apart at the hinges connecting the wings. Others were set on foundations that were too weak or shallow to withstand the twisting caused by the abrupt movements in different directions. Still others fell apart because they swayed and banged into close-set neighboring buildings. And years of structural decay due to lack of maintenance had already weakened many low-rise adobe structures.

Now, as part of the code revision, the entire subsoil of the city center is being mapped for the first time. Downtown Mexico City is largely constructed on filled-in lake beds, and the muddy earth intensified the vibrations of last year’s quake, experts say. The foundations of many buildings were unable to withstand the prolonged vibrations that shook the city center.

The new regulations, at least in the zones where Mexico’s geology is softest, will probably be stricter than the previous codes, which had evolved over the years.

“The toughest regulations were designed for an earthquake of 7.5 on the Richter scale,” said Emilio Rosenbleuth, an architect and adviser to the government code review committee. “No one had anticipated an earthquake of this intensity.”

The Sept. 19 quake measured 8.1 on the Richter scale.

The earthquake posed the greatest reconstruction challenge in Mexico City since Spanish conquistadors destroyed the Aztec capital here five centuries ago.

The national government in particular faced the challenge of regrouping after its hesitant performance in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.

In the first hours of the quake, all of Mexico City’s long-distance phone service was destroyed--the long-distance equipment was all located in one building--and 40% of the city’s local service was disrupted. Damage to pipes and aqueducts affected 20% of the city’s water supply.

According to city officials, a total of 12,747 buildings, public and private, were damaged. More than one-third of those structures suffered severe structural damage and another 15% collapsed in whole or in part.

$1-Billion Cost

In the 12 months since, the government has succeeded in tackling to some degree the multiple problems of rebuilding and housing the homeless. The cost of reconstruction, including housing, new hospitals, repair of telephone lines and waterworks, will probably exceed $1 billion, according to the city government.

Long-distance phone service has been restored, the vital equipment now at four decentralized points in the city to avoid the possibility that a future quake could knock out all service in a single stroke. Water mains have been repaired, as have scores of damaged schools.

“The government proved its ability to reorganize and solve problems,” said Manuel Garcia y Griego, a historian at Colegio de Mexico, a postgraduate think tank in Mexico City. “It overcame the political crisis of the quake.”

The work continues. Scores of buildings have been demolished, leaving gaps in Mexico’s extended skyline. Many other structures are in various stages of demolition. Among the more frightening sights in Mexico City these days is the dangerous demolition circus atop skeletal skyscrapers where workers use sledgehammers to batter concrete beams beneath their own feet.

Housing for 44,000

The city is building housing for 44,000 homeless families. About 37,000 of these families now live in tin and wooden shacks on city streets. The rest receive aid to rent housing. More than 70,000 construction workers are laboring to rebuild homes.

About 2,200 small apartments, all a uniform 48 square yards, already have been turned over to the earthquake homeless, mostly in the old adobe and brick neighborhood of Tepito. More will be inaugurated on Friday, the anniversary of the quake.

The housing projects have been the subject of intense debate over the months, with delays in construction leading to street demonstrations. In addition, many citizens remain wary of construction ethics. The government has tried to reassure them.

“We had to prove there were no tricks and that people would actually get new homes,” said Gamboa, the city housing official.

To allay fears of faulty construction, city contractors are leaving structural columns and reinforcement rods exposed until the last possible moment, giving future residents a chance to inspect the quality themselves.

Defused Complaints

The very visibility of the construction appears to have defused complaints from the homeless.

“The homes seem sound,” said Felicita Encarnacion, 57, one of the first recipients of a new apartment. “I think they are taking care.”

Wariness of government intentions still haunts some of the homeless, however. Residents in Tepito have refused to abandon their teetering homes until they receive documents from the city that entitle them to replacements.

“We want the contract in our hand and then we’ll move,” said Ines Guaneros, a resident of a cracked tenement that is buttressed precariously by wooden beams.

Financially, the government has been helped by various forms of foreign aid. Creditors allowed payment of $950 million due last October on Mexico’s foreign debt to be postponed for at least a year to provide money for reconstruction.

The government is spending about $150 million for new housing; a World Bank loan is providing about the same amount, and private donations account for about another $50 million.

In an uncustomary display of openness, the government is publicizing accounts of income and expenditures widely. “We want to avoid charges of cheating,” Gamboa said.

For all its openness, the De la Madrid government still shies away from frank discussion of one statistic: the count of the dead.

The official figure, one that almost no one believes, is 4,287. That number is based on the number of death certificates issued. It does not account for unidentified bodies that were crushed beyond recognition, nor for bodies that were unclaimed and hurriedly cremated.

In any case, a cursory review of numbers of dead and missing at a few major disaster scenes undermines the official figure.

According to residents, 1,100 died at the Nuevo Leon building. At Juarez Hospital, 879 perished, according to excavators who counted the bodies. The fallen pediatrics ward of General Hospital claimed 277, officials there said, while residents of the fallen apartments in the multifamily Juarez complex claim that 1,000 died. About 3,000 were killed in the large Roma neighborhood, residents’ groups say. One hundred and fifty died at the Conalep Technical School, the government reported.

‘More Dead, More Blame’

That still leaves the dead in the Tepito neighborhood, in government office buildings, in five hotels and the badly damaged Centro Medical hospital complex unaccounted for.

In defense of the government figure, presidential spokesman Manuel Alonso said: “It would be in our interest to inflate the number. We could have asked for more foreign aid.”

Countered Cipres Villareal, the environmental activist: “The government needed to show that things weren’t too bad, that it had everything under control. The more dead, the more blame.”

Last fall, a U.N. study estimated that 6,000 people died and that 2,000 were missing and presumed dead. Then-U.S. Ambassador John Gavin estimated the toll at a flat 10,000. Some Western embassies put the toll as high as 35,000. Offhand comments from Mexican citizens often put the figure at upward of 50,000.

In any event, it appears that the true number will never be known.

Nor are doctors sure that they will ever know just how and why about 40 babies survived trapped in the rubble of the fallen Juarez and General hospitals, without food or water, in darkness and isolation, for anywhere from a few hours to nine days.

Today, Sara Valencia, like most babies of her age, finds trying to take her first unaided steps a game that ends in a pratfall. She is almost a year old now, having been born at about 3:05 a.m. last Sept. 19, only hours before the earthquake began. Her happy gurgling and steady attempts to grab at toys reinforce the uplifting memories of her rescue after a week under the accordioned floors at Juarez.

The unexpected survival of the babies continues to confound and fascinate doctors here.

Puzzled by Survival

“It goes against all we expected, all we would have predicted,” said Gildardo Villanueva, a physician who treated Sara when she was rushed from Juarez Hospital to the National Pediatric Institute on the southern outskirts of Mexico City.

Theories abound: The cold and moisture preserved the babies’ energies, some experts say. They possessed a heretofore unknown reservoir of nutrients to help them survive. They felt no anxiety and therefore did not waste strength on trying to escape. They produced a chemical that had the opposite effect of adrenaline to calm them and slow their metabolism.

“The truth is, we don’t really know,” said Miguel Angel Rodriguez, a physician at the National Pediatric Institute.

The doctors have been observing Sara’s health carefully over the last 12 months, especially her mental development, to study the effects of the lack of food and water during her first week of life. The ordeal left her 1 1/2 pounds lighter, from 7 1/2 pounds to about 6.

So far, her development is normal, the doctors say. She moves with agility, is alert and has normal reflexes.

Died in Hospital

Sara’s mother died in the hospital during the quake. Her father remarried and, as is sometimes customary in Mexico, the parents of the mother kept Sara rather than turning her over to a stepmother.

“It wasn’t hard starting over again,” said Rosalia Maldonado Valenzuela, 52, Sara’s grandmother. “Well, maybe the first few nights when she cried a lot.”

Another of the rescued babies may not have been so lucky, although the case is difficult to analyze.

Jesus Manuel Lopez was in Juarez Hospital suffering from massive internal infections before the building fell. The day of the earthquake, he was 3 weeks old. He, too, survived seven days under the layers of cement and brick.

Today, his reactions are a little slow and he does not hold himself as upright as he should at his age. He may develop normally, but, whatever happens, doctors will probably never be able to ascertain whether any problems resulted from the week’s deprivation or from his previous medical problems.

For the survivors who lost relatives and close friends, a year has been insufficient to erase their grief.

Recently, Maria del Carmen visited San Lorenzo Tezonco cemetery south of the city. A reporter approached as she meticulously clipped grass atop a grave with a pair of sewing shears.

“Yes, he was my husband,” she said matter-of-factly, indicating the grave.

Then she broke into sobs.

“And my 2-month-old is buried over there,” she said, pointing. “My 4-year-old there. A 7-year-old there.”

They all died in the cave-in of an Education Ministry building where her husband was a doorman and where the family lived, she said. Del Carmen, who was on her way to work, and a 13-year-old son, traveling to school, escaped unharmed.

“It still seems impossible,” she said of her loss.

Many bodies were never found or were crushed beyond recognition.

In San Lorenzo Tezonco, two long mass graves attest to the hundreds of anonymous dead. The government put up a tombstone with an inscription that says:

Your death was a message for us.

You died unknown,

But God has identified you.