In Mexico, Survival Is a Group Effort

It was a typical Saturday afternoon on the corner of Chalco and Garay in Mexico City’s poorest district--until the ground opened up and swallowed Pati Ortiz.

Ortiz was sitting at Hortencia Gener’s quesadilla stand when they heard the earth crack. Gener felt Ortiz grab at her skirt. She heard her scream. And then, Ortiz was gone--sucked into a 20-foot-deep hole that ruptured without warning in the concrete patio where she sat.

It was a sinkhole, one of dozens that pop open each rainy season in a sprawling, overpopulated city built on the worst possible site--a lake that Mexico’s Aztecs chose as their imperial seat long before the conquering Spaniards drained it to make way for modern Mexico City.

Bystanders at Chalco and Garay and bus drivers from Routes 2 and 98, who were scrubbing their vehicles while on break nearby, did not call the police or summon an ambulance or the Fire Department. Rather, four of them--one after another--dived in after Ortiz in what became a failed and fatal rescue mission.

Three of them died along with Ortiz, overcome by poisonous fumes that lay just beneath the street’s surface.

The sole survivor, 24-year-old Jose Luis Sanchez, explained several days after being pulled unconscious from the hole: “All I felt was desperation--not fear. I didn’t think about what I was doing. I just did it.”

The incident is under investigation by city agencies to determine the cause of the deaths and the source of the subterranean pollution that created the fumes. Local residents and activist groups say it was a dramatic reminder of the many daily dangers faced by the capital’s more than 20 million people.

But neighbors, friends and local officials say the case of the fatal sinkhole in the impoverished Iztapalapa district also shows a side of Mexican culture few outside the country ever see: a sense of community and selflessness that has shored up the nation’s social fabric despite economic recession and deepening political scandal.

“It’s very noble, but it’s also just the way Mexicans are,” Enrique Rubio, municipal spokesman for Iztapalapa, said of the rescue effort. “When there are problems, the people all come out to help you. Just look at the 1985 earthquake. Everyone dedicated themselves to helping others, outdoing government services.”

Public reaction immediately following the 8.1-magnitude earthquake--which devastated more than 10 square miles of the capital, killed as many as 10,000 people and left 30,000 others homeless--was a watershed for citizen survival.

With city services unable to respond to the destruction, neighbors risked their lives to save each other, co-workers carried wounded on their backs to hospitals blocks away and others died in rescue attempts.

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“In one given moment, we had 1 million people administering aid, staging rescues, building shelters and clearing areas of debris,” said Carlos Monsivais, a social critic and author of a book on the subject. “It was the most impressive reaction to a natural disaster. The relationship between the government and the citizens changed. . . . People realized they can achieve more by organizing themselves.”

The September 1985 quake spawned dozens of grass-roots citizen groups that are now institutions in the capital, and it enshrined the survival instinct that repeats itself week after week here on a far smaller scale--like the spontaneous attempt to rescue Ortiz.

“It’s just a way of being for Mexicans,” spokesman Rubio said. “You probably never talk to your neighbors, but if they’re in trouble, you’re out there helping them.”

Rubio and other city officials readily acknowledged that the cash-strapped capital is unable to consistently provide many basic public services, so residents faced with an emergency often have no choice but to turn to anyone who can hear a cry for help.

Recently released statistics underscore the problem. Response times to the 72,548 emergency calls received in Mexico City during the first six months of this year were dismal, they show. In at least 4% of those calls for ambulances, firetrucks or police, help never arrived. In other cases, it took more than an hour. And the worst response times were registered in Iztapalapa, which also led the city’s 16 districts in total numbers of emergency calls, with 10,771.

Short of resources, the city contracted the “08” emergency service--the equivalent of 911--to a private company that operates it by charging subscription fees. The overwhelming majority of the city’s population can’t afford the dues. And company officials concede that although the service is available to nonmembers, they get far worse service.

“It’s important to point out that there is a great need for better response capability,” company official Graciela Lopez Perez said.

The Mexican Red Cross tries to augment the emergency services. About 10 days ago it sent ambulances to the site of a bus crash that killed 16 passengers on the outskirts of the city within seven minutes of the call. But Isaac Oxenhaut, commander of the agency’s ambulance service, said the sheer crush of cars and people often gets in their way.

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Ambulances stuck in traffic on the city’s major arteries are a routine sight. Most of those highways were built with perilously narrow lanes, and most lack emergency shoulders. As a result, another daily image here is that of motorists stopping to help strangers repair a broken-down car that otherwise would tie up traffic for hours until road service crews arrived.

“We don’t have a sufficient budget to meet everyone’s needs,” Rubio said. “There should be more public services, better security, more police patrols. . . . For this reason, the people are even more active.”

That clearly was the case the day the ground opened up at Gener’s food stand. The entire incident is a tale of how things work--and don’t--in the second-most-populous city on the globe.

The house and patio where Gener had her quesadilla stand shouldn’t have been there in the first place, city engineers say. “It’s a restricted zone, within the canal zone,” said Iztapalapa’s chief engineer, Alfonso Hernandez. “It’s illegal to build there; it’s not safe.”

The simple, one-story orange abode and its now-buckled patio is one of about 200 houses built during the last four years on terrain that once held swamps, farms and canals.

“By law, they shouldn’t be building here, but they’re building based on their needs,” said Mario Teodoro Salvador, the neighborhood’s elected president. “If you actually process all the appropriate licenses, you run out of money before you even start construction.

“Inspectors come by, but you work out an agreement,” he added with a wink. “It’s the easy way out.”

Engineers privately acknowledge that bribery of building inspectors is common in the city’s fastest-growing districts, such as Iztapalapa. And city officials said the massive influx of migrant labor from the countryside to the capital means that people are clamoring to pay for the right to build on any sliver of land.

“In this region, there is a big problem with land invasion, usually in high-risk areas like this,” said Xochimilco district engineer Rogelio Hernandez, who was inspecting the Iztapalapa sinkhole one recent afternoon in an effort to help his adjacent district prevent such cave-ins.

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“Another problem is that most of the city’s water comes from underground reservoirs in this southern sector, and the water table is dropping, which could cause more sinking and more sinkholes.”

The falling water table that precipitates most of the sinkholes in the capital ranks high among Mexico’s most serious environmental dilemmas--a problem rooted in centuries of bad decisions.

When the Spanish conquistadors took the Aztecs’ imperial seat here in 1521, the ancient city was an island in the center of a lake. To expand their new capital, the Spaniards drained the lake and started building in a dried-up lake bed made of clay.

The Spanish colonizers then compounded the problem. After they drained the lake, they had to build aqueducts to bring drinking water in from distant springs. By the 1850s, those springs ran dry and city officials started tapping into underground reserves to quench the thirst of a population that has grown exponentially through the second half of this century. Today, the water is being pumped out of the aquifer much faster than nature can replace it.

The impact of the dwindling underground water reserves is mind-boggling. Scientists estimate that the reserves will be unusable in several decades because they will be so low.

What’s more, as the water table has dropped, so has the capital: Mexico City has sunk a total of 34 feet since Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortes arrived here almost 500 years ago. And as the city increasingly exploits the water reserves beneath Iztapalapa, scientists say the area around it now is sinking at the rate of a foot a year, causing buckling pavement, cracking foundations and sinkholes.

All that helps account for the crater that swallowed Pati Ortiz. But it doesn’t explain why she and three others died in it.

The city’s helter-skelter growth is part of the reason. Iztapalapa chief engineer Hernandez said his preliminary findings show that Gener’s patio most likely was built above an old septic tank--an uncharted, subterranean relic from the days when the neighborhood was farmland. As the human and animal waste in the tank decayed through the years, it apparently generated lethal quantities of methane gas beneath the land.

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When the hole opened, it released the gas inside. Ortiz was killed within minutes.

It was during those minutes, after they heard her screams, that the bus drivers rushed to her rescue. The first one in the hole, Sanchez recalled, was his best friend, Giovanni Trujillo Barrios.

“He was the kind of guy who would give his life for anyone,” said Sanchez, still fighting back tears a week after the failed rescue. “When he didn’t come back, the driver we call El Topo went down. . . . Then this soccer player passed by and, with all the screaming, he lowered himself down the rope. But he fainted just like the others.”

The other drivers took no chances with Sanchez; they tied the rope around him like a harness so they could pull him out if anything went wrong.

“I lowered myself down with a wet towel tied around my face because of the gases. But as I got close to Giovanni, I started to feel weak. I reached out for him. But that’s the last thing I remember. I fainted, and the others pulled me out.”

At that point, friends and bystanders called for help. But witnesses said it took an hour and a half for ambulances to arrive. By then, all but Sanchez were dead.

One recent afternoon, Gener was near tears as she dished out quesadillas and tortillas at her new location just 30 feet from the still-gaping hole. She had known Ortiz for 12 years, she said, and her 34-year-old friend left behind two daughters and a son.

But the roadside cook steadied herself when asked whether she fears another hole might open up so near the first. She just shrugged and explained that the bus depot is her livelihood; she has to be there, she said.

“In this city, there are risks wherever you live,” said Ramon Acevedo, a neighbor standing nearby. “Anything can happen anywhere.”