The bay of Acapulco becomes small underfoot as the helicopter rises from the Naval hospital. From a bird’s eye view, this Thursday the city is a panoramic view of ruins and ghosts after the passage of Otis: the hurricane gutted the exclusive hotels where the jet set Mexican got drunk with champagne on those eternal nights; golf courses look like pool tables that someone has filled with broken glass; The beaches are empty, some boats float peelingly adrift; The hills, which used to be a radiant green, are now a sickly brown after the wind tore off the leaves and left only the stunted trunks; The poorest neighborhoods have lost their tin roofs and debris colonizes the streets; From the irregular settlements on the hills, columns of smoke rise where their inhabitants set fire to enormous pyres with the garbage brought by the biggest storm that the Mexican Pacific coasts have ever known; The idyllic postcard of Playa Diamante has left luxury behind and is more reminiscent of a photograph of a bombing.
The helicopter lands with a crash on an airport runway. In a hangar, dozens of soldiers from the Navy Secretariat unload and stack tons of cans of sardines from a truck that will later be distributed among the most isolated rural communities. The city is devastated – the official number of victims, not updated for several days, is 46 dead and 59 missing – but inland Otis He hasn’t had mercy either. There are dozens of towns and villages that have spent a week cut off: without contact with the outside world due to the loss of electricity and light; no water supply at the tap or in stores; without food beyond what they kept in the pantry or what they could hunt, fish or harvest; drinking water from rivers and coconuts. The Navy assures that they have been making about 70 daily flights for several days so that humanitarian aid also reaches the most remote places in Acapulco.
Once the truck is unloaded, the metal belly of the helicopter must be filled: cans, rice, beans, liters and liters of bottled water, toilet paper, dog food and all the basic products necessary after a disaster like Otis. At around two in the afternoon, the aircraft takes off towards San Isidro Gallinero, a community of less than 3,000 inhabitants cloistered in the mountains. Fly over the Tres Palos lagoon, which shines under the sun with a cloudy and wild color; the green hills; the ruined cornfields that look like toppled dominoes; the palm trees twisted in the direction of that wind that swept everything in its path at 250 kilometers per hour.
The helicopter’s propellers raise a huge cloud of dust that shoots towards the inhabitants of San Isidro Gallinero. Hundreds of people wait for the arrival of supplies, sheltered from the sun under umbrellas and the few shades that exist on a sort of dirt soccer field on the outskirts of town, the only surface flat enough to land on. When the plumes of dust dissipate, the young men form a human chain to unload the boxes of humanitarian supplies.
Beans, corn and river water
San Isidro Gallinero is a town of dirt roads and adobe houses with roofs built with materials such as asbestos, a mineral that is extremely harmful to health. Its inhabitants are farmers who eat thanks to the corn fields, the lemon and mango trees, the coconuts from the palm trees. The hurricane has devastated their entire harvest and, with it, their only means of subsistence. There has been no electricity or internet connection for a week, food has been scarce and, if it had not been for the reserves of their own crops, hunger would have been a much bigger problem than Otis. Thirst has forced them to drink water from rivers and springs.
—Aren’t you afraid of contracting diseases?
—It’s better than dying of thirst.
The one who answers is Domingo, who is 57 years old and like almost everyone here cultivates a corn field: “I lost the entire cornfield, we need strong help from the Government.” The stories are similar: everyone lost their roofs and crops and many of them their entire houses, which, being made of adobe and wood, did not withstand the onslaught of the hurricane. Like Maria, who saw how her mud hut collapsed brick by brick. Now she and 14 other relatives take refuge with her mother-in-law, in an equally small hut. “We are cramped, we sleep on the floor. Help came [de alimentos] before, but not everyone gets it, there are many of us. Right now we are in the same situation, they say that [los víveres que trae la Marina] They will not be enough for everyone. People supported us with beans to eat. Our entire harvest is lost. We need the help because everything is getting expensive too,” she summarizes.
Agripino Manzanares (72) smiles under his straw hat. He, who has lived and planted these mountains all his life, was a little luckier than Mary. Otis It only ripped off its roof. “The hurricane felt horrible, like a destructible force: blades flying, trees uprooted. The first days the situation has been critical, you see: there is no light, there is no signal, we are all stagnant. The good thing is that we are an agricultural town. There is no gas here, but there is firewood, we are not as sad as in the city. Thank God we have not gone hungry, but we have been cut off, we had three days to free the road. It was ugly here, we had never suffered this… as they say… this contingency of something natural.”
In the town, the hurricane has been another misfortune to add to a long list of extreme poverty and institutional abandonment; a misery the size of mud houses and dirt floors, of elderly people like Manzanares who are forced to continue working in the fields to eat, of total dependence on humanitarian aid to survive. Shortly before Otis, an earthquake—another one in a region accustomed to the earth roaring—swallowed dozens of cabins. Manzanares looks at the long term, beyond the supplies that the Navy brings: “We need the help of the Government for our agriculture, to be able to replant and cultivate the lands that were spoiled, to help us with crops.”
On this trip – it is the seventh today – the soldiers are not in the town for more than 15 minutes. When all the boxes have been unloaded, the soldiers pose for the official photographer of the body with the neighbors. Someone shouts a “long live the Navy” that sounds not very spontaneous and is echoed by only a few applauses. The misery of San Isidro Gallinero can be measured in that song, in the half-hearted applause against the hunger of the people who have to start again from scratch, rebuild their huts, replant their crops and thank the Government for some crumbs that will cushion them for a few days. the poverty of a lifetime of scarcity. When the helicopter takes off, the inhabitants of the village blur again among the columns of dust.
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