Government Blamed for Deaths in Mexico

Even as it rushed more food, water and soldiers into beleaguered Acapulco on Monday, the Mexican government faced a storm of criticism for its lack of preparation before the devastating hurricane that lashed the resort city last week.

Politicians, scientists and newspaper columnists said scores of lives could have been saved if authorities had evacuated hillside slums that were swept away by torrents of rainwater.

“When it comes to civil protection, we’re still in diapers,” complained Abraham Zabludovsky, a newscaster for Mexico’s leading television channel, Televisa, in a striking departure from its usual pro-government line.

“We hope this will be corrected,” he said on the midday news Monday. “This always happens after a tragedy--but then tragedies always happen again.”

The catastrophe also highlighted a disastrous lack of regulation in Acapulco, where peasants had chopped down trees and built shantytowns on unstable hillsides. Hurricane Pauline ripped into Mexico’s Pacific coast Wednesday and Thursday, leaving 193 people dead and hundreds missing, many in Acapulco, according to local officials. The Red Cross estimates 400 died in the states of Guerrero, which includes Acapulco, and Oaxaca.

Authorities have insisted that it was impossible to foresee the fury of Pauline or its consequences in Acapulco. “No machine, no instrument, could have predicted that the hurricane would have this magnitude,” said Tomas Benitez, a spokesman for the Guerrero state government.

In addition, officials noted, many residents appeared to ignore storm warnings on television and radio.

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But with frequent bulletins being issued by U.S. and Mexican meteorological stations, it was clear that a major storm was approaching the coast. Authorities acknowledged that there were no appeals to citizens to evacuate, no shelters set up in Acapulco before the storm.

Opposition politicians called Monday for an investigation into the preparations for the hurricane and punishment for those responsible for the many deaths.

But others said the lack of preparation reflected the fact that Mexico is only slowly developing mechanisms to respond to disasters. This country didn’t even have a civil protection system until after the devastating Mexico City earthquake of 1985, officials noted.

“With these storms, it’s not possible to pinpoint exactly where they are going to hit . . . and it’s difficult to evacuate people when it is so difficult to mobilize them” in a large area, said Jose Barroso, president of the Mexican Red Cross.

The tragedy focused fresh attention on the precariously built shantytowns on the slopes of the mountains surrounding Acapulco’s famous deep-blue bay. Ivan Restrepo, a Mexico City environmentalist, said the local government had moved peasants off the badly eroded mountainsides in the 1970s.

Twenty years later, they were back.

Although Restrepo and other environmentalists had warned the government of the danger of letting settlers chop down the trees and build in the mountains’ dried-up riverbeds, the settlers continued to arrive.

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Restrepo and others blamed corruption for the proliferation of the peasants’ unsafe shantytowns. “They were tolerated if they voted for the PRI,” he said, referring to the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Calls to the mayor’s office in Acapulco were not returned. But Mexican newspapers quoted a number of peasants saying they had bought their land on the mountainsides from local leaders of the PRI or other parties.

President Ernesto Zedillo, a member of the PRI, has vowed that the hurricane victims’ homes will be rebuilt, but in a safer area than the mountainsides.

As Mexicans debated who bore the blame for the hurricane’s devastation, authorities continued sending food, water and medicine to Acapulco and other affected areas.

Soldiers took over operation of the city’s 67 shelters after victims complained that volunteers were stealing or hoarding food, water and other aid.

Hundreds of sailors joined the cleanup effort Monday, picking up plastic bottles, tin cans and other litter that had been washed onto Acapulco’s famous beach.

The Mexican Red Cross said it had sent about 1,500 tons of aid to the disaster area and received about $70,000 in cash donations.

Robert Randolph of The Times’ Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.