Mexico: Survivors of Buried Guerrero Town Seek to Recover Dead, Rebuild

The Village of La Pintada Remains Buried (Photo: Jorge Carballo)

Milenio: Juan Pablo Becerra-Acosta M.

Atoyac de Álvarez, Guerrero • A survivor, a coffee farmer, looks at his watch. The second hand of his watch is plastic. He counts: one, two , three ... up to thirty. Thirty seconds. That's how long the nightmare lasted. But the terror is still felt today. Thirty seconds. The time needed to breath ten times. Ten inhalations and exhalations.

That's how long, a month ago, it took for a hill to break off above La Pintada, a village of just over 600 inhabitants located in the municipality of Atoyac de Álvarez, Guerrero, in the Sierra Madre del Sur [Southern Sierra Madre Mountains]. Thirty seconds to bury 71 people and dozens of houses, cars, two schools, a church and shops under tons of mud. Almost the entire village. Thirty seconds of panic, the inhabitants say.

"First there was a thunderclap. Like something really hard broke. Then it shook. In thirty seconds the entire earth came over. Then the mud came, it was like a red cloud ... the color of reddish mud. The whole sky looked like a red cloud. Afterwards no more shouts or groans were heard. That was at three in the afternoon. At eight o'clock there was another little landslide, and what remained of the hill fell. And then nothing else was heard: pure silence."

So the people of La Pintada tell what they suffered. These twenty people still remain in the place, accompanied by some soldiers and marines. A month later, the clay-colored cloud that in thirty seconds invaded everything is not seen now. Nor are the screams of terror, the shouting and pleas for help. Today, there is only silence.

The old coffee-growing town seems like an image frozen ... where nothing moves. A photo. An inane sequence. Wherever you turn, there is no life, only destruction: the church of ten meters [33 feet 9 inches] lies buried in mud, the bell tower barely sticking up: its cross and black bell lie tossed aside. Houses are tilted and crushed. Houses compressed so their roofs barely stick out. Skinny dogs wander alone searching for anyone to latch onto. Scrawny chickens peck the ground desperately fishing for a grain of whatever. Nothing. 

Suddenly a backhoe interrupts with its noise. Six people surround it. They are relatives of some of the dead. Of 71 people killed, only 23 bodies have been recovered. Of these, 21 have been identified; two others are unidentified. Too many tons of weight on the dead make them unrecognizable. They are going to do DNA testing.

A crying woman approaches. She begs them to send machinery. She lost many people under the devastation: her seven-year old twin girls. A child of 15 and also her mother. She weeps. Another three families weep who refuse to leave until they are able to bury their dead. A man picks up a shovel. And there he is, under the rain that does not leave this place, shoveling mud where he believes that his loved ones lived their last thirty seconds ...

Days pass. Although the vast majority of locals are no longer here, but in homeless shelters located in Atoyac and Acapulco, the demand is the same: rescue the bodies of the dead. The problem is how to do it. Such is the quantity of hardened earth. Such is the amount of mud. But the relatives insist:

"We are not leaving here. Do you know what it is like not to have a place to put candles? Not to know where to pray for our dead? How do we place flowers if we don't have the bodies? Give us this rest, please ... ," begs a young man of seventeen who lost his parents.

The tragedy in La Pintada is also macabre ...

Cesareo Moreno, one of the leaders of the community and of the coffee cooperative recounts ...

"The mud fell into the river that passes through the village. The mud clogged the river, then the river's force swept the mud, unlocked the channel. And with the days we have been finding pieces downriver ... "

Milenio: Pieces?

"The day before yesterday they found a body, a trunk without legs or arms or head. We do not know who he was. We buried him in the cemetery while we investigate. We buried him with twenty-one other bodies that we are able to identify by the clothes they were wearing, each one in his own space. We buried them together with other tombs of two bodies that we don't know who they are. Another day we found a woman's arm. Another day a man 's leg. It's been tough ... "

The meanness of the disaster ...

In La Pintada someone stuck a Mexican flag to the dead ones in the middle of the mountain of mud that buried the village. There it is, drenched, dirty, in the middle of the gigantic tomb of mud. It rains heavily. Now Hurricane Raymond threatens to pick on this place of pain that, one month later remains steeped in the unmistakable bittersweet smell that is the smell of death. 

In Acapulco, in the shelter for the inhabitants of La Pintada, there is no end to the people's suffering. Certainly, like three times a day they thank the Marines for assisting them, but--accustomed to the cold of the mountain forests--they suffer the sweltering heat of the port city. And there they are, without houses, without their belongings, some wandering around like zombies, like this little 13-year-old kid who doesn't want to talk, doesn't want to eat, who already has a month of skinniness, who now has blank eyes and an inscrutable face, and who lies sprawled out on a mat. His mother says,

"It's that I was in the field working. I am a widow, and he had left the house going on an errand when the hill fell. He managed to run when he was at the door, but not his little brothers and not my father. He saw how they had remained buried there. And he doesn't talk. To me, my heart wants to explode with pain, señor ..." The mother cries and cries.

The people of La Pintada, besides recovering their dead, want only one thing: to rebuild their lives. To be placed in a shelter near their community. And, as the President promised, that they [the government] might help them rebuild their village, close by, not far from the original La Pintada--the place of the huge black rock from which who knows what magic and mystery came (since it is the only stone of that color). This rock that decades ago gave them the name of their now buried village ... Spanish original