Mexican ’quake victims still in tents, huts after two years

Press, 23 September 1987, Page 28

Mexican ’quake victims still in tents, huts after two years

By

PHIL DAVISON

NZPA-Reuter Mexico City Two years after an earthquake devastated Mexico City, thousands of families who lost their homes still live in tents or primitive corrugated iron huts near the city centre. The September 19, 1985, earthquake killed at least 8000 people and left about 100,000 families — 500,000 people — homeless.

Most have since been housed through Government or private programmes. But at least 15,000 families are still awaiting help, some 8000 or 40,000 people, in camps they set up themselves near their fallen homes. Many earthquake victims criticise the pace and extent of the Government reconstruction programme. The President of Mexico Miguel de la Madrid, in his State of the Nation address recently, said his Government achieved its reconstruction goals and that 500,000 homeless people received Government or private assistance. His Minister of Housing, Manuel Camacho Solis, said that 80,000 families received new homes and 15,000 more would be

housed in the near future. Their words are small comfort to victims such as Leticia Robledo, aged 32, who lives downtown with her husband, Teofilio, her brother-in-law and four children in a 6 x 4m oneroom corrugated iron hut, with a wooden flap as a lone window. It is in a row of 21 huts that form what residents call Encampment Seven. In an area rife with robberies, a 3m mesh fence topped with barbed wire separates them from passing traffic.

The huts have electricity but no water. The 21 families share a communal toilet and shower room, connected to the city water supply, and a communal kitchen with six gas rings. Robledo paused from cooking “sopes,” a Mexican tortilla snack, in the kitchen to describe her plight.

“Gracias a dios, we all survived, although our house collapsed around us,” she said. “We try to forget but we’ll never really get over it. No-one will.

"For a long'time. I had to take sleeping pills. My nerves were bad. I was afraid to go down into the underground in case I never got out. \

“One of our neighbours, who lost several of her family, could not speak for three months," she said.

“The Government has done nothing to help us,” she said, adding that help had come only from the national Red Cross of Switzerland and a private aid group, the Sole Coordinator of Victims, known as C.U.D. Robledo said she would pay a 28,000 peso monthly mortgage (just under SNSO) with no deposit, for a new home under an agreement with the Swiss group and the C.U.D.

The leader of the C.U.D., Cuauhtemoc Abarca, said in a recent interview that more than 40,000 people died in the September 19 earthquake and a second tremor that rocked the city a day later.

He said he based his count on lists drawn up by neighbourhood groups that sprang up after the disaster.

Official figures after the earthquake were always vague. The Government at first spoke of 3000 or 4000 dead. The then United States Ambassador to Mexico, John Gavin, was the first to mention higher figures, estimating at least 10,000

maybe 20,000 dead. A United Nations study later spoke of at least 8000 dead, which gained acceptance as the official toll.

The worst single toll — possibly more than 1000 dead — was in a high-rise apartment block known as the Nuevo Leon, on the northern section of the tree-lined Reforma Boulevard.

It was there that the Spanish-born opera singer, Placido Domingo, lost several relatives and joined in the rescue attempt digging with his bare hands.

Most of the building’s rubble has gone but the foundations remain, flooded by seasonal rains, an eerie reminder of the tragedy. A wooden fence hides the ruins from the boulevard but occasionally someone passing by slips in for a look.

“Somehow, you still get a feeling that there’s life in there,” one such passer-by said at the site.

Similar high-rises, originally built under a State scheme, stretch along the area, damaged and unsafe. Workmen are adding steel rods and concrete to make them habitable.

Residents had long complained that the

Nuevo Leon was unsafe, saying it contained insufficient concrete and steel.

Many private engineers agreed that corruption, causing substandard construction practices, played a role in the damage. A high proportion of public buildings, such as hospitals and schools, collapsed. Psychologists say most earthquake-related traumas, such as fear of entering high buildings or going underground, have worn off. For months after the earthquake it was not uncommon to see a Mexico City resident jump because of a shaky table in a restaurant or the rumble of a passing train.