ACAPULCO, Mexico - The Mexican government searched for victims and continued assessing the damage Saturday from the one-two punch of storms Manuel and Ingrid, as a missing federal police helicopter working on the rescue was found crashed. All aboard died.
Meanwhile, in Mexico City, criticism mounted in editorials and public commentary that the government had made the natural disasters worse because of poor planning, lack of a prevention strategy and corruption.
“Governments aren’t responsible for the occurrence of severe weather, but they are for the prevention of the effects,” Mexico’s nonprofit Center of Investigation for Development says in an online editorial criticizing a federal program to improve infrastructure and relocate communities out of dangerous flood zones. “The National Water Program hadgood intentions but its execution was at best poor.”
President Enrique Pena Nieto and Guerrero Gov. Angel Aguirre flew to the remote mountain coffee-growing area northwest of Acapulco near La Pintada.
Ingrid and Manuel simultaneously pounded both Mexican coasts last weekend, killing at least 101 people, not including the helicopter-crash victims. Another 68 people remained missing in La Pintada, where soldiers continued digging after a landslide wiped out half the town.
“There is little hope now that we can find anyone alive,” Pena Nieto said after the flyover, adding that the landslide covered at least 40 houses.
In a meeting with hotel owners in Acapulco, Pena Nieto said the reconstruction phase has begun and that thegovernment will help address the hoteliers’ concerns, including about the main thoroughfare from Mexico City, the Highway of the Sun, which was closed by slides and damage in the storm, cutting off access for days. Aguirre and other government officials publicly confirmed that corruption and political dealings allowed housing to be built in dangerous areas where permits should have been rejected.
“The responsibility falls on authorities,” Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said in a news conference last week. “In some cases [the building] was in irregular zones, but they still gave the authorization.”
The federal police helicopter, lost since Thursday, was located early Saturday. Government spokesman Eduardo Sanchez said the number of victims is still being determined and could be between three and five people. It wasreturning from La Pintada, where weather conditions initially hampered rescue efforts and flights into the area. The Mexican government late Friday gave a list of damage from Ingrid and Manuel, which later gained hurricane force and rolled into the northern state of Sinaloa on Thursday morning.
The storms affected 24of Mexico’s 31 states, and 371 municipalities, which are the equivalent of counties. More than 58,000 people were evacuated, with 43,000 taken to shelters. Nearly 1,000 donation centers have been set up around the country, with nearly 700 tons of aid arriving so far to the state of Guerrero, the hardest-hit state. Nearly 800,000 people lost power.
Seventy-two key highways were damaged, including main arteries that left Acapulco isolated for days, as thousands of tourists awaited airlifts out of the resort city.
The highway reopened Friday, albeit with many detours skirting stretches damaged by flooding and landslides. As of Saturday, all the stranded tourists had been able to leave Acapulco. The Center of Investigation for Development said Mexico had not been hit by two simultaneous storms since 1958.
The editorial said that while rescue efforts and aid are indeed humanitarian, they also provide good images for opportunistic politicians.
Prevention “like that in developed countries, designed to avoid the negative impact of natural events on people, doesn’t seem to sell advertising or create grateful constituents,” the editorial says.
Front Section, Pages 8 on 09/22/2013