Donovan Bejarano was still working when it started to rain in Naucalpan. Heavy, very heavy, and increasingly so. It was Monday afternoon, about six or seven o’clock. Someone reported that the water had washed away the earth on the hill.
—Go away pa up there that washed away.
At that time Bejarano was still calm.
—Take a pick and shovel.
—No, it won’t be much.
The family was celebrating a birthday in a house that could not be called a house: some poorly finished brick walls and the rest were wooden pallets, sheets, plastic, tarps, whatever could be used to prop up the weak walls. The water ran down the hillside, stripping the ground of mud and weeds. The boy came down from the hill, his parents sent him to buy something at Mr. Mariano’s store. The storm was raging against La Raquelito, one of those colonies that have scratched space from the mountain, a valley through which a brown river runs between two grey hills by means of cement constructions that defy the law of gravity, hanging over the ravine, with no space for the air to flow. When the boy returned from the store, an avalanche of earth had knocked down a wall that could not be called a wall. His family was under the rubble.
The boy ran back to the store and asked for help. Mr. Mariano activated the alarm, which had been installed some time ago as a shield against insecurity. The street filled with neighbors, some of whom notified Bejarano. “We had no idea how serious it was. When we arrived, no matter how much we dug, we couldn’t get them out. We were so helpless, scraping with our hands…; how we did it with the cactus plants, then with the tangled grass, mud. As more people arrived, more help came, but even so we couldn’t do anything. When we arrived, one of them was still reacting, but then she didn’t. She didn’t answer. When they took out the bodies, that’s when they took me down. I felt bad. They were my nieces. All the weight fell on them.” Bejarano’s voice breaks.
The mud swallowed up six people who died buried inside. Four of them, including Bejarano’s nieces, were minors, aged 10, 11, 13 and 15. The other was 18. The last, about 60. Three more survived: the parents, “a mechanic and a worker”, and the child who went down to the shop. It was not a big avalanche, just a few furrows of earth on a hill that should not support buildings, even if they were as precarious as that one.
“It was a minor landslide, but it still managed to kill six people. It’s a mess, isn’t it?” asks Arturo Chavez, a bricklayer who lives a few meters from the landslide, while leaning his back against the wall of his house, which he built. A normal house, built by professionals and with the inspections required by law, would have withstood the flood, but the hut made of recycled materials did not hold up. The six died because they could not afford anything better. They died because they were poor.
People climbed the hill with flashlights, picks, shovels, buckets. “Then Civil Protection arrived, the police, the firemen, but the work itself was done by all the neighbours. The situation was disastrous,” says Pablo César Rosas, another 37-year-old bricklayer who participated in the rescues. They pulled out the three survivors. They said there were more people trapped. “They started to dig up dirt, and they found the bodies. Then the police arrived with the dogs and they found two more bodies. It was all over at 12:30.”
The neighbors formed a human chain. They brought the bodies down from the hill and laid them on the grass next to the Emiliano Zapata Elementary School. The next morning, someone had lit candles in the place where the bodies had once rested. On the same street where the children who died in the avalanche used to play with other children from the neighborhood. “It was very ugly, the family is devastated. They were people of low resources and right now we have to support them.”
Dogs and trash
To get to the landslide, you have to climb up almost vertical streets and turn off onto a path that crumbles under your boots. On the side of the hill, trees are uprooted, vegetation crushed. There are other shacks scattered here and there. Water is still seeping through the cabin that was hit. Its rooms are soaked, everything is dripping, the floor is mud. The buckets they used to bail out dirt are lying around by the dozens. The wall has collapsed, overcome by a tongue of mud. A canvas roof is surprisingly resistant. There is garbage, rusty bicycle frames, wet blankets and covers. A pack of dogs growls from inside, but they soon calm down. It’s not that you can’t call it a house. It’s that you can’t even call it a cabin.
Rodrigo García Pérez, a 25-year-old bricklayer, lives with his wife in a yellow building that his parents built more than three decades ago, right below the collapsed cabin. He didn’t hear the avalanche — no one did. He discovered that something had happened when Mr. Mariano activated the panic button. “People started running with boats and everything, but they couldn’t go up anymore because the hill is slippery. At night they started to remove the earth from here to there, but the water that runs from above affected everything down here. It was wet all night.” His living room was flooded, as it has been since the irregular houses were built on it. The entire wall is a patch of damp.
The land on which the house was built belongs to no one, but García says that the owner of the buildings next door charged rent for the substandard housing. His brother Saúl, 38, says: “The landslide was caused by digging to build those houses. It didn’t happen before.” “The man knew that it wasn’t right and he still left it. He didn’t know them.” [a los fallecidos] “But I had had a talk with them because it affects me and I had told them that they couldn’t be there, that it was going to collapse at any moment, but the man never listened. For me the solution is to dismantle all of that. We’ve been here for years and nothing of this magnitude has ever happened,” Rodrigo adds.
It’s not just the Garcías’ house, almost all the residents of La Raquelito have become accustomed to living among streams that make their way between buildings, small landslides, and humidity. Colonies like this one in the State of Mexico, built irregularly on hills, are especially vulnerable to landslides, floods, or earthquakes. This Tuesday, a firefighter died in another avalanche in Naucalpan. On Friday, nine people died in a landslide in Jilotzingo. Ecatepec is flooded. Chalco was. The state governor, Delfina Gómez, from Morena, walked through Naucalpan this Tuesday, promising help and covering funeral expenses. Hours later, when the rain started to intensify again, she asked the residents to leave the neighborhood and take refuge in shelters.
After the landslide at La Raquelito, the press reported that the Emiliano Zapata Primary School had been damaged. In fact, the landslide barely touched it. Above it is a kindergarten that acts as a barricade against the floods. It is a small cement school, painted in bright colours, which takes in 90 children between the ages of three and five. The force of the water and mud has cracked the walls. Teachers like Erika Varela, 46, hide the cracks with drawings, a virtue of necessity.
Varela does not live in the neighborhood but has been a teacher there for a decade. In a classroom with a huge drawing of The Little Princethe story of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, points to a crack in the wall: “When it rains, that is a waterfall. Consider the risk it poses to our children. There are no protective measures. This problem has been going on for a long time and we have been asking for help.” [al Gobierno]They come, they check, they take photos, they write down, but they haven’t given us a real answer. We are worried because we don’t want what happened last night to happen to us again. Since the landslide happened last night, are they going to take us into account? It’s not fair. We’ve already been affected by the forest fires. The neighbors planted pumpkins up there and on some occasions they have fallen and shaken the school. Imagine if a big pumpkin shakes the school, what will happen with a landslide. The teachers’ concern is the children. If a landslide comes, we won’t have time to get them out.”
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