Hurricane Pauline Leaves Those With Kin in Mexico in Dark

Two days after Hurricane Pauline ravaged Mexico’s Pacific coast, Lucia Ramirez still didn’t know Saturday if her teenage son, mother and brother are among the survivors.

“I’m worried to death,” Ramirez said outside the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles.

With telephone service to Acapulco and other shattered communities still spotty, Ramirez is among the legions of Southern California residents desperately seeking information about relatives and friends in Mexico.

People have besieged the Mexican Consulate and aid organizations with demands for information. On Saturday, consular officials in Los Angeles finally posted the first confirmed lists of the dead, naming 77 casualties, from infants to septuagenarians. Associated Press reported that at least 201 people have died.

The widespread sense of grief once again underscores how events in Mexico, from natural disasters to political upheaval, reverberate in Southern California.

“We are trying our best to satisfy the demands of all the people who have called us,” said Alejandro Schiavone, Mexico’s deputy consul general, who is coordinating efforts from the consulate complex on 6th Street across from MacArthur Park. (Those seeking information can call [213] 351-6825 or [213] 351-6826.)

Too often, however, consular officials simply do not know the answers. The long-awaited partial list of fatalities released Saturday only included victims from Acapulco, not those from nearby towns and coastal communities of neighboring Oaxaca state, also battered by Pauline’s fury. Many immigrants in California come from Oaxaca and Guerrero state, which includes the sprawling Acapulco.

“Our people here work in factories, in restaurants, in all kinds of jobs,” said Mario Jimenez, who heads an association of Guerrero natives.

Mario’s Tacos, Jimenez’s restaurant in Pico Rivera, has become a prime destination for information-seekers and the multitudes--including many people not of Mexican heritage--seeking to provide aid.

Donors have already provided huge amounts of clothing, food, medicines and other essentials for survivors, echoing similar outpourings of support that followed calamities such as the 1985 earthquake that devastated Mexico City.

Donations range from $1 gifts and bags of used clothes to the tons of canned goods provided by merchants and food companies. Airlines have offered free transport of the donated material.

“People feel a sense of solidarity with our compatriots who are living through this tragedy,” said Hortencia Magana of the Mexican Benefit Organization, a private social service group in East Los Angeles that has been providing aid to needy Mexican nationals here and abroad for six decades.

The California National Guard has been involved in collecting, packaging and transporting food, water and other goods donated for Mexico, said Gov. Pete Wilson, who added, “We have been deeply moved by the tragedy.”

In Acapulco on Saturday, angry victims of the storm lambasted Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, who cut short a state visit to Germany to visit the devastated Pacific resort.

While Zedillo kissed babies and hugged survivors in front of news cameras at a relief center, other people shouted at him in frustration, complaining that help had not yet arrived two days after the hurricane whipped through.

“What do you mean, no?” Zedillo asked, after being told that no aid had been received, according to a report by Reuters news service. “Is there water?”

“No!” shouted the crowd.

Anxious about loved ones residing in and around Puerto Angel, a once-sleepy fishing town on the Oaxacan coast that in recent years has become a tourist mecca, Lucia Ramirez turned to the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles. Ramirez has been unable to get through by telephone to learn the fate of her 15-year-old son, Cesario; her mother, Micaela Peralta, 65; and her brother, Jesus Ramirez, 26.

Her family, like so many others, has been divided by immigration.

“I feel so desperate, so helpless,” Ramirez, a seamstress in a factory, said as she stood outside the consulate with an older brother, Nicolas, and her 13-year-old daughter, Isabel. “Now, all we can do is pray.”