Relief Trickles In for Chiapas Flood Victims

President Ernesto Zedillo joined in preparing 150 house sites Saturday for flood victims in Chiapas, a symbolic start to rebuilding a region devastated by what Zedillo has called the worst disaster to strike Mexico since a 1985 earthquake killed thousands.

With the official death toll at 172 and unofficial reports of up to 400 dead and as many missing, the president made his fifth visit to the region since the rains began Sept. 1. Zedillo has touched down in numerous cutoff villages to assure people of help from the government’s emergency food aid program, which is being ferried in by a fleet of 75 helicopters.

In Villa Comaltitlan, a ravaged town 40 miles northwest of the regional city of Tapachula, Zedillo joined the mayor in marking out home sites for families whose houses plunged into the two rivers that run through the town.

Earlier in the week, Zedillo expressed scorn for nongovernmental and commercial relief efforts, saying he had not seen any of their well-publicized aid reaching the devastated communities. The aid groups retorted that the government was failing to provide air transportation for the collected food.

On the ground and oblivious to such squabbles, the combined forces of the army, civilian engineering teams and ordinary people were slowly winning back lost terrain, bridge by bridge and mile by mile. Work crews were reopening the highway across the plains with temporary crossings, and families were shoveling tons of sand and muck from their homes--those that still remained.

And all along the coast, as more stunned and hungry villages were reconnected to the world, people emerged with tales of communal solidarity, cynical exploitation and dogged survival.

Luis Enrique Gomez Ferro pointed to a raging torrent that coursed alongside his family’s small ranch: “That was the road to our house. Our pickup truck is right there,” submerged in what is now a 10-foot-deep river channel.

It is a new branch of the Rio Despoblado, Spanish for Uninhabited River, which runs from the jagged Sierra Madre in southern Chiapas state down across the verdant coastal plain and into the Pacific Ocean near the Guatemala border.

The river’s name is painfully apt in the aftermath of 10 days of flooding of brutal intensity. A hamlet of a dozen shacks along the river has vanished.

The Rio Despoblado is just one of 15 major rivers that exploded in early September across a 150-mile-long stretch of foothills and coastal plains, driving about 450,000 people from their homes. In one broad swipe, the only productive terrain in Mexico’s poorest state suffered incalculable damage.

For most of the first 10 days in September, furious storms, raging simultaneously in the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific, squeezed the southern Mexico mainland.

The storms pummeled the Sierra Madre. From Sept. 5 to Sept. 9 alone, more than 20 inches of rain fell--24% of the annual average in just five days.

Now, in humid 95-degree sunshine that is raising the risk of sickness and dehydration, the scale of the tragedy is becoming clearer each day as rescue teams reach more isolated villages.

Among the official statistics: 1.2 million people were affected, and more than 750,000 acres of tropical farmland was damaged, including cattle grazing land and plantations of banana, cocoa, date palm and mango trees.

The infrastructure damage was ferocious.

Transportation Minister Carlos Ruiz Sacristan said 22 highway bridges and five rail bridges were destroyed and 18 more bridges seriously damaged, and 275 miles of paved roads were affected. The main highway, from the regional center of Tonala to Tapachula, is expected to be passable only later this week.

The rivers surged with such force that in many cases they cut entire new beds and channels, rolling straight over what used to be bends in the waterways. And in the process, they tore away huge highway bridges.

At Rio Despoblado, it took several days for civil engineer Alonso Escobar and his team of 300 workers, supported by huge Caterpillar earthmovers, to build a temporary crossing over what had been a 600-yard-long bridge and causeway.

Escobar used temporary dikes and piles of stones to build a causeway. He had to literally re-route the river back to its original course before he could create a fragile link to another 20-mile stretch of highway, allowing aid trucks into Villa Comaltitlan and victims out.

While Escobar directed his mechanized troops at the bridgehead, a few villagers waged more solitary struggles nearby.

Julio Acuna used a shovel and his bare hands as he tried vainly to divert a new river channel from his house. He said he lost 25 head of cattle to the flood waters, while a dozen shacks of the poorest families living on the riverbank had been swept away, leaving the river’s edge a desolate scene of uprooted trees.

“And what the river didn’t take, the thieves took,” Acuna said. “They came the next night while we were in the shelter in town. They took the only valuables we had.”

At the Villa Comaltitlan town hall, Mayor Luis Antonio Ramos Cruz, a member of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, said his town was cut off during the first three days of the disaster. “We didn’t receive even one grain of sand of support. We organized the entire rescue effort ourselves.”

Then supplies began to arrive by helicopter, he said, and army troops came to run the shelters.

Zedillo touched down last week with words of support and a check worth $10,000 for supplies and make-work jobs to get the paralyzed local economy going again.

“This is a poor town, and the problem is so enormous. We think it could take us 20 years to get back to where we were,” Ramos Cruz said.

He recounted the damage in his town alone: 14 dead and, unofficially, 50 missing. Fifty-four of the town’s 77 outlying communities were flooded or cut off. A tenth of the population of 32,000 moved into shelters. The floods destroyed 225 houses and damaged 7,500 acres of crops.

Officials say 10,000 fishermen have also been badly affected. They will be included in plans to create more than 40,000 temporary jobs to tide people over.

A Times reporter accompanied a relief helicopter flight to Aztlan, a remote, traditional farming and fishing village of 200 people in grass-thatched reed huts on the Pacific shore that remains cut off by road.

Belying reports of fights over aid, villagers waited politely as an army lieutenant unloaded bags of cornmeal for tortillas. Paulo Hernandez, 22, said people were not starving thanks to a food drop three days earlier, but all their crops were destroyed. People are worried about the months ahead, Hernandez said.

As he flew back to the relief center, pilot Gumaro Melo carefully circled two nearby submerged and abandoned villages, checking for stranded people. There were none.

The town of Escuintla, 15 miles northwest of Villa Comaltitlan, is the new focus of efforts to build a temporary crossing over the next broad river, the Cintalapa.

For now, the only option is to strap into a harness and slide across precariously on a pulley hanging from a wire. Dozens of people lined up patiently. Most carried drums of gasoline or boxes of food, often so heavy that their legs dragged in the water as they were pulled across.

As they moved deeper into the affected towns, officials whispered more darkly about the town of Valdivia, farther northwest and still cut off. Those who visited by helicopter said the stench of death was overwhelming from animal and, presumably, human bodies. Some houses there were buried in mud up to the eaves.

Standing on a newly cut riverside cliff where his 70-year-old mother’s house had plunged into the Vado Ancho River near Villa Comaltitlan, Juventino Reyes lamented: “What took her 20 years to put together was gone in half an hour.”

Reyes said he usually earns $3 a day as a farm laborer, but now the farms are gone and he has no way to support his family.

“We are poor here at the best of times,” he said. “We saved nothing; we only saved our lives. Now we are awaiting their answers, and to learn who among us they will choose to help.”

In several of the worst-hit towns along the coastal plain, some of the hungry and homeless victims complained that government aid was slow in arriving. But most expressed grateful thanks for the aid and accepted Zedillo’s plea for patience given the scale of the disaster.

Reyes’ mother was one of 750 people still camping out in a school auditorium and two other shelters in Villa Comaltitlan, 10 days after the worst flooding hit.

The survivors had brought with them the pitifully meager belongings they had saved: an old radio, a few buckets and pans. One old woman was asleep, coughing, on a wooden table. Another said with tears in her eyes that town police had pulled her from the water as her house was collapsing and vanishing into the river.