In Mexico, Critics Say Political Corruption Worsened Impact of Dual Storms
Eduardo Verdugo/Associated Press
San Jeronimo, Mexico, on Friday after being struck by rains and floods caused by Tropical Storm Manuel. The federal police have been helping to aid the victims.
By ELISABETH MALKIN
Published: September 20, 2013
MEXICO CITY — The twin storms that tore through the country this week, unleashing rains that sent mud crashing down hillsides, buckling roads and flooding coastal cities, have renewed criticism that corruption and political shortsightedness made the damage even worse.
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Alejandrino Gonzalez/Associated Press
Buses on Friday as they made their way to Acapulco to pick up tourists stranded by Tropical Storm Manuel. A patchwork of roads to Mexico City had been partly reopened around midday.
The death toll rose to 101 late Friday, but was expected to climb higher as rescue workers reached by air isolated mountain villages that had been cut off by landslides along the Pacific Coast. Soldiers continued their search Friday for 68 missing people in La Pintada, a coffee-growing village in Guerrero State where a hillside had given way and a river of mud poured over the town’s center.
“Anywhere you fly over you will see a number of landslides that are truly shocking,” Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said Friday.
The storms battered both the Pacific and Gulf Coasts starting last weekend, a rare double hit from tropical systems at the same time. But experts said officials had not learned from earlier hurricanes and had failed to prepare for disaster, which magnified the losses this time.
“If we had the right development plan, the country wouldn’t fall into chaos,” said Angel Macías Garza, the vice president for infrastructure at the Mexican Construction Industry Chamber.
Corrupt officials give permits to developers to build along riverbeds and in canyons, Mr. Macías said. State governors build roads without containing walls in flood-prone regions because they prefer to spend the money they save on handouts. The federal disaster fund allocates only 5 percent of its budget on prevention and the other 95 percent on reconstruction.
“Politically, prevention doesn’t pay,” Mr. Macías said. “There is a lack of vision and a lack of resources.”
In an editorial posted on its Web site, Cidac, a research group, echoed the criticism. “Taking preventive measures, like relocating settlements from the most vulnerable areas or investing in infrastructure,” the authors said, “doesn’t appear to sell ad space or generate grateful constituencies.”
The worst natural disaster to affect Mexico in years began last weekend when Manuel, a tropical storm, battered Acapulco and the surrounding Pacific Coast at the same time as Hurricane Ingrid, a Category 1 storm, bore down on the Gulf Coast. Mexico had not seen paired storms on both coasts since 1958, officials said. Manuel then spun out to sea and gathered force before buffeting Sinaloa State in the north again on Thursday.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in a brief visit to Mexico City on Friday that had been scheduled to encourage closer economic ties between the countries, announced that the United States government had donated $250,000 to the Red Cross for emergency relief and offered more direct American assistance. “It’s your decision,” he said, careful not to make the offer seem a criticism of the handling of the storm by Mexico’s president,Enrique Peña Nieto.
Mr. Peña Nieto, whose performance in the crisis is being closely scored, spent most of the week flying between coasts to monitor rescue efforts, and canceled a visit to New York next week to address the United Nations General Assembly.
He has been pushing Mexico’s Congress to approve an ambitious agenda of laws that would raise taxes, open up the energy sector and confront powerful monopolies.
Mexico’s economy has stagnated, and growth may not reach the government’s tepid forecast of 1.8 percent. Mr. Peña Nieto’s plans for new investments in infrastructure to help jump-start the economy could be derailed by cleanup costs after the storms. Mexico’s construction trade association estimated that fixing the roads alone could cost more than $3 billion.
Still, the president said on Wednesday, these storms “will not paralyze the development that Mexico should have.”
The government reopened the main highway between Acapulco and Mexico City on Friday under blue skies, while officials farther north were just beginning to tally the damage from Manuel.
Tiny La Pintada mourned its missing Friday as soldiers continued to search the river of mud for victims. A police helicopter vanished in the region late Thursday, a sign of how perilous the mountain rescue effort was.
Many of La Pintada’s residents had been inside making lunch, which may have saved them, when the hillside collapsed Monday, Mr. Osorio Chong said. But the number of victims may rise, he added, as residents of nearby farms often waited in the town center to use the telephone there.
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