Anger Vies With Grief as Mexico Digs Out

A few minutes after army rescue workers recovered the 94th body from the deadly mud Sunday afternoon, a young soldier reached down into the ooze and gently pulled out a miniature brass picture frame.

His fellow soldiers paused as he held aloft the portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s most revered religious symbol, and placed it on a concrete wall--as if to let the Virgin watch over the painstaking search for more victims from Mexico’s worst natural disaster this decade.

Grief was mixed with growing anger in much of Mexico on Sunday as the death toll rose above 400 from landslides and flooding caused by record-breaking rain that has pummeled nine of Mexico’s 31 states. More than 200,000 people have been driven from their homes along the Gulf Coast and in inland valleys.

In Tabasco state, police used tear gas and batons to break up an enraged crowd demanding faster distribution of food and water, which have grown scarce in areas cut off by the floodwaters. A number of people were arrested as police battled to keep order in Villahermosa, the state capital.

Elsewhere, flood victims also complained of slow and disorganized relief efforts as authorities have struggled to cope with the magnitude of the damage from a tropical storm that sat stationary in the Gulf of Mexico day after day, dumping 70% of a normal year’s rainfall in 72 hours in some towns.

But the image that has most haunted Mexicans remains the vicious landslide that encased an entire neighborhood in a cascade of mud Tuesday night in this mountain city in Puebla state. It was by far the deadliest single incident in last week’s downpours, and the ravaged hillside has become an excruciating symbol of the latest and ugliest in a series of recent disasters in Mexico.

“I feel like a part of me has been ripped away,” said Jorge Cruz Juarez, 37, as he stared across the raging Rio del Calvario, or Calvary River, toward what had been La Aurora.

The destruction of this poor neighborhood of 25 to 30 concrete homes, spread over a steep slope leading to the city’s cemetery at the crest of the hill, became known to the rest of Mexico, and the world, only Thursday, three days after it occurred. Until then, all communication with the city of 130,000 had been cut off.

By dusk Sunday, with rain again pounding down relentlessly, teams of soldiers and police had pulled 96 bodies from just the La Aurora site--”and 90-95% of them were women and children,” said public security director Amadeo Andrade. Elsewhere in the town, 28 more bodies had been found, he said, the dead having been either swept away by raging streams or buried by landslides. He said an additional 10 to 15 victims could still be buried in the mud at La Aurora.

With the death toll in Teziutlan alone totaling at least 124, the city accounts for more than one-fourth of the fatalities reported nationwide. But the cost in Teziutlan goes far beyond the deaths. Roads and bridges are cut, the city’s drinking supply is mostly disrupted because of broken pipes, and a once-surging economy is suddenly at a standstill.

“What you are seeing is the economic paralysis of this region,” said Rogelio Contreras, regional director of the state Social Development Ministry. “‘It will take years to rebuild and repair all the damage. Now we are just dealing with the crisis. The biggest work is not today, but in the days and months ahead.”

At La Aurora, more than 100 police, soldiers and civilian volunteers, working in small teams in sometimes driving rain and a constant sullen fog, sifted with shovels and their bare hands through the layers of earth encasing the wrecked houses.

Signs of the lives that had vanished were scattered through the soil: the foot of a blue bed, a sheet of corrugated tin roofing crumpled like a balled-up piece of paper, the leg of a doll.

Nursing her bandaged injured arm, Maria de los Angeles huddled with other survivors on the edge of the site and recalled that she spent two hours buried inside her mother’s shop at the foot of the village until she was rescued. But the crashing wall of mud killed her 3-year-old niece, Daniela.

“She was like my daughter,” De los Angeles said. “All three children living next door died as well, and further along a whole family of 16 people was swallowed up.”

Under an emergency tent, survivors scratched through a drawer full of mud-stained photos and school report cards. De los Angeles broke into tears as she pointed out families who had died, shown in the photos at weddings and on beach outings. Alongside a salvaged but soaked copy of Cervantes’ “Don Quixote de la Mancha” was the handwritten choir book of Esther Landa, another young victim.

Alejandro Bello Bonifacio, a 29-year-old volunteer, noted that “all these were poor people who had come from the countryside to work in the assembly plants. Most were here just a few years.”

Teziutlan is one of several cities in Puebla state that have become centers of clothing assembly, often putting together garments that are exported to the United States for companies such as Guess? and Tommy Hilfiger. These export plants, known as maquiladoras, have attracted thousands of people from the farms in the surrounding mountains of Puebla and the adjacent states of Veracruz and Oaxaca, many of whom built homes in precarious locations such as La Aurora.

In Veracruz, Gov. Miguel Aleman said Saturday that he would seize properties where illegal communities had been established, to reduce the danger of floods sweeping away such settlements again.

Teziutlan Mayor Jose Sanchez Tinoco, who was coordinating the movement of rescue crews and relief deliveries from the sidewalk of the municipal building on the town square, acknowledged that La Aurora was an “irregular settlement.” But he said that the town had never before experienced anything similar and that there was no way to anticipate such a tragedy.

The mayor said the townspeople had pulled together when no outside help was available and had set up two dozen shelters and made sure food was available for the homeless. He estimated that 1,500 houses in Teziutlan were destroyed and noted that the main water supply was still interrupted even as more rain fell, making it much harder for rescue workers to reach outlying villages that remained cut off.

But some Teziutlan residents said all the relief efforts were focused on the Aurora landslide, when many more people were homeless and without help.

“We asked them to cut down trees that are falling on our houses, but they said they were too busy with the excavations,” said Arsenia Calixto de Arias, a 30-year-old mother of two. “We are afraid to stay in our house, and now we are five families sharing one room.”

Other survivors kept repeating their stories of good luck. Lina Martinez Romana, a 37-year-old mother of five, had watched out her window as all the houses next to hers were swept down the 1,000-foot-high hillside. Somehow, her house stood strong.

“The house shook like an earthquake,” she said. “I saw the land fall away below me out the window. My children remember seeing a pear tree sailing past.”