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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | September 2005 
Katrina Echoes Mexico City's 1985 Disaster
 Morgan Lee - Associated Press
| | Maria Elena Buendia who lost three children during the earthquake of 1985, lights a candle during a mass at the Tlatelolco apartment complex. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the 8.1 earthquake that killed more than 9,500 people and injured at least 40,000 in Mexico City. |
Mexico City - For Mexico City, Hurricane Katrina had strong echoes of the earthquake 20 years ago that toppled buildings, hit the poor hardest and shook Mexicans' faith in government.
The skyline is soaring as the capital marked the 20th anniversary Monday of the earthquake that killed at least 9,500 people and leveled whole sections of the city. But some scars are still visible and scientists say the city may be unprepared for the next quake.
"That the poor were the ones that couldn't evacuate (from New Orleans) is something that caught our attention," said Luis Wintergerst, the city's director of civil protection. The 1985 quake also hit the poor hardest, he said.
In the quake's aftermath, civic and neighborhood groups sprang to the rescue, disgusted with the government's weak response. They gave birth to a spirit of grass-roots involvement in public life and politics that remains a source of national pride.
Araceli Santamaria, born the day before the quake and pulled from the rubble of a collapsed hospital, has no doubt about how people will respond to another disaster.
"Are people ready? Morally, yes," said Santamaria, a college student whose education is subsidized by a trust from foreign donors dedicated to 13 surviving "miracle babies" pulled by volunteers from two collapsed hospitals.
Mexican authorities don't have the personnel or enough training to deal with another 1985-magnitude quake, and ordinary people may have no choice but to pitch in, said Roberto Hernandez, president of Topos Mexico, or Mexico Moles, a search-and-rescue group. Organized by young people to dig through the rubble of 1985, it still exists, ready to pitch in if disaster strikes again.
after Hurricane Katrina but never got a response. However, Mexican Army troops traveled to U.S. soil for the first time in 159 years to help care for hurricane victims, and a Mexican navy ship sailed to the Mississippi coast to help.
Lying in a flood- and earthquake-prone valley, Mexico City has rebuilt itself more than once since the Spanish arrived in the 16th century. Flooded in 1629, it remained under water for nearly three years. While the Spanish fled their homes, more than 30,000 Indians died.
Today, high-rises have sprouted on the city's western outskirts, and the historic center is recovering some of its 1950s splendor with the addition of a high-rise hotel, foreign ministry headquarters, a courthouse and luxury apartments.
The capital's high-tech skyscrapers include the 55-story Torre Mayor, Latin America's tallest, with a foundation 280 feet below ground and 98 giant quake absorbers.
Julieta Guadalupe, 29, remembers the floor moving and the walls cracking on the morning of Sept. 19, 1985, before her family abandoned a teetering building.
She is still in a camp built for earthquake refugees on an abandoned lot, sharing a one-room tin-and-asbestos shack with her husband and two daughters. Other inhabitants long ago moved to permanent city-built apartments, but they are too small to accommodate offspring families like Guadalupe's.
"I'm hoping they build here soon," she said. "The room is very small."
Even now, Mexico City hasn't entirely cleaned up. In the Roma neighborhood, condemned buildings and rubble fill gaps between townhouses left intact. On Chihuahua Street, squatters and dogs live on a pile of twisted steel and concrete that once housed offices of Mexico's state oil monopoly.
"We came here because we don't have anywhere else to live," said Carlos Chavez, 36, who washes car windshields for spare change.
Rodolfo de la Torre, an expert on poverty at the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City, said the earthquake helped clear out derelict buildings and replace them with sturdier ones. But although building codes were tightened, enforcement is bedeviled by corruption .
And as the poor multiply, they are moving into illegal structures on quake-prone land.
The problem with earthquakes is that no one can be sure where it's dangerous to build, said de la Torre. "Earthquakes not only generate tragedy but also information," he said. The answers "may have to be revealed through another earthquake." |
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