Mexico City, Largely Rebuilt Since ’85 Quake, Copes Despite Officialdom : Politics: Temblor shook up status quo in government. Now, citizens take matters into their own hands more often.

The catastrophic earthquake that devastated Mexico City five years ago lasted only a minute or so, but it set in motion political and social tremors still felt today.

Besides leveling buildings and homes, killing thousands (some estimates say 30,000) and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless, the quake seriously damaged the image of invincibility of the governing political party, radicalized many citizens and demonstrated to many others, if only briefly, the viability of “people power.”

The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) still governs the city of 15 million, but less certainly than before. Most of the volunteers who poured into the streets returned home changed, more confident of their power and distrustful of the government. Some of the volunteers stayed on as political activists.

In the moments after the thunder of buildings falling to the ground subsided, citizens took charge.

They rushed into the battered streets to rescue the trapped and unearth the dead. They set up shelters for the homeless and started rebuilding. And they did all this without help from a paternalistic government that had always done everything; did it without the omnipresent PRI.

“I would say that five years later it is still trembling in Mexico City,” said Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, a political analyst, newspaper columnist and researcher at the National University’s Center for U.S. Studies.

“It showed Mexico City for just a second in the historical framework of time what it would be like to be in a city where the government becomes subordinate and accountable and the people emerge, and the people rule and the government obeys.”

The quake hit at 7:19 a.m. on Sept. 19, while most people were at home or en route to work. Registering magnitude 8.1, it was classified a “great” quake. Another the next day measured 7.5, but most of the damage was already done.

In a country where the government had been the main provider of assistance for decades, citizens of all stripes--students, neighbors, private engineers, tough street gangs--went into the streets by the thousands to help. One government estimate said there were 1 million volunteers, unusual in a country with no tradition of grass-roots volunteerism.

They organized themselves into brigades to dig their way to survivors, pull out bodies, bring food and water to the homeless and the rescue workers.

“The people were trying to save people’s lives and the government was trying to regain control,” said Adrian de Lope, then a student at the private Anahuac University.

Now 25, De Lope was one of those who stayed in volunteer work. He spent four years after his graduation working with the school’s housing and community development project for earthquake victims. He is still a fund-raiser for the project.

“The people have the power, or at least they know that they can have it,” he said. “They now know that they are able to do things that they didn’t know they were able to do before.”

Lorenzo Meyer, a historian at the Colegio de Mexico, said many city dwellers were already fed up with the authoritarian political system.

“But that particular (governmental) tardiness, the slowness of the response, made them more willing to criticize openly the behavior of the bureaucracy and the lack of leadership of (President Miguel) de la Madrid.”

On the other hand, government officials say no city hit by such a large disaster has been able to rebuild so fast. They point to the reconstruction, replacement, repair or financing of 105,000 housing units in three years.

“The magnitude of the damage, the tragedy, was so great that we even had to take a while to be able to perceive and know the extent of the disaster,” said Enrique Jackson, president of the PRI in Mexico City. “Certainly if it hadn’t been for society we wouldn’t have been able to begin to attend to and help the affected people. The people had a big role.”

The PRI began to recoup, organizing residents into reconstruction committees at the new housing units.

Out of the rubble, questions arose. Citizens asked how the buildings that fell had been built. They wondered why hospitals, government offices, the 14-story Nuevo Leon building collapsed, killing hundreds.

After a week, the government stopped counting bodies, as if to try to diminish the disaster.

“The government was directly in charge of some of those constructions, somebody you can pinpoint as the guilty one,” Meyer said. “You can end with another classic case of corruption, so you diminish the importance of the damage and hope that society will not demand an inquiry.”

No one went to jail in connection with any of the collapses.

But in the July, 1988, general election, De la Madrid’s successor, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, lost in the capital to leftist parties.

“The rejection of the PRI in the ’88 election is very connected with the earthquake, with the incapacity of the government to resolve the problems and also with the many neighborhood organizations that emerged,” said Heberto Castillo, a Democratic Revolutionary Party leader.

The PRI’s Jackson said economic crisis and increasing masses of poor, not the quake, hurt his party. The party won in the voting districts hardest hit by the quake, he said.

The PRI won the congressional and Mexico City assembly races, but in those same districts, the left defeated Salinas.

The city today looks much the same as it did. Many of the shiny glass-walled high-rises are reconstructed earthquake-damaged buildings.

By contrast, the weathered steel skeleton of an Agriculture Department building juts out on Reforma Boulevard, one of numerous structures yet to be rebuilt or torn down. There are parks or vacant lots where buildings once stood. Small camps house some of the thousands who remain homeless.

Brightly colored vecindades --small row houses around an inner patio--stand out in low-income neighborhoods where old shacks, given a final blow in the quake, were torn down.

Some government offices moved out of downtown or to the provinces.

A construction code passed after the quake stiffened requirements for tall buildings. But there is lingering worry about another major quake. Seismologists are keeping an eye on a fault in a different location off the Pacific Coast. Movement there, they say, could shake the lake bed where Mexico City sits as strongly as the last quake.

“If there is a tremor now, it’s not the same as before. Now we know that buildings fall and people die. Now people react with more fear of earthquakes,” said Carmen Blanco, a National University psychology professor. She worked in the school’s post-earthquake psychology service.

If the city has been largely rebuilt, its people will never be the same again.

Evangelina Corona, 52, who worked as seamstress on San Antonio Abad Street, dared not confront her employer before the quake. Now she is an outspoken union leader.

Before the quake, she sewed so fast her machine smoked. She thought it good of her employer to give a country woman with a third-grade education a chance.

Then the buildings crammed with sewing factories gave way, trapping hundreds of seamstresses. Her boss said the jobs were gone, there would be little severance.

By mid-October, seamstresses from the different factories had organized into a non-government union.

Antonio Paz quit his job as a government social worker because of the way the government was handling recovery efforts. He helped organize his damaged neighborhood first to survive, then rebuild, without government help.

Paz works with an organization called Campamentos Unidos (Camps United), a self-help housing association rebuilding neighborhoods with no government assistance. With help from Operation USA and other international groups, it also has built a neighborhood clinic and is planning to build a Center for Studies of the Neighborhood to provide research, advice and training for projects.

Some of the quake victims are also rebuilding their lives.

Inspired by handicapped Vietnam Veterans in Miami where he was fitted for prosthesis, Celso Garcia has remarried and he and his wife are expecting a baby. His first wife, one of his two daughters, a sister and a cousin died in the quake when their fourth-floor apartment collapsed. Both his legs were crushed and later amputated.

Dr. Jose Juan Hernandez Cruz, trapped four days between the concrete slabs of the government’s Juarez Hospital, has not married but has adopted a daughter, now 2. He works at a Health Department clinic until midafternoon and at a prison in the evenings. He is looking forward to visiting the French team that rescued him.

The 19 babies who were discovered one by one in the wreckage of hospitals, the last one nearly nine days after the quake, are now in kindergarten. One has met the American firemen who rescued her.

One of the 19 is Evelia Alvarez Gasca, whose mother died in the quake. She is being cared for by a 31-year-old aunt who has cancer.

Raul Reyes Gonzalez is a street vendor, selling fried pork skins and other tidbits. Since the earthquake he has been doing volunteer work at a neighborhood housing association.

Reyes Gonzalez’s old slum neighborhood was the site of one of Campamentos Unidos’ first projects. Before the quake it was a collection of one-room wood and cardboard shacks with two bathrooms for 600 people, too flimsy to be damaged.

Government and private projects put up condominiums, replacing communal toilets and laundry sinks with facilities for each apartment.

“Simply with the bathrooms, socially there has been a 90-degree turn,” Reyes said. “We aren’t yet high society, but we’re living like human beings.”

He said he still works as a volunteer for the satisfaction of seeing others “have a home worthy of a Mexican.”