Doña Mago got up on Saturday with the desire to fight.
With official help slow to arrive, the 50-year-old encouraged her neighbors to clean their homes themselves and pick up the debris left by Hurricane Otis, which devastated Acapulco, the legendary tourist port in southwestern Mexico.
“We will fight for ourselves,” Doña Mago, alias Margarita Carmona, told AFP after using a machete to cut down trees toppled by 270km/h winds shortly after midnight on Wednesday. The hurricane caused the death of at least 39 people, most of them from drowning.
Next to her, Julián Matadama, a construction worker, and other neighbors clear away mud and debris with a small wheelbarrow, while other women remove the tin roofs that covered their house.
Doña Mago and her neighbors live in Puerto Marqués, a popular beach in the Mexican tourist port on the Pacific.
Seafood restaurants are completely destroyed. So far there is no electricity or communication, and water and food are starting to run out.
“I want to return to my house,” says Doña Mago at the entrance to her collapsed house where she lives with her daughter and grandchildren.
The day before, she felt abandoned after waiting in vain for help from local and federal authorities.
Without tourists
A restaurateur, Omar Flores, returns to his small restaurant on the beach in Puerto Marqués, where he and his family were still offering seafood and fish to tourists on Tuesday, a few hours before the hurricane.
The kitchen and roof were destroyed, but the rest of its furnishings miraculously withstood the winds and torrential rains. Bottles of water and beer fill the refrigerator, which is shut down due to a lack of electricity.
“It will be another blow to everyone who works on the beach like us. We won’t have any tourists,” Omar sighs. “I’m just thinking about the money we’re going to need to get back on our feet…where are we going to find it?”
The hurricane hit Acapulco a few weeks before December, the start of the peak tourist season, laments Juana Flores, who dries clothes, swimsuits and shirts that she usually sells to tourists.
“We don’t know what will happen,” worries the 69-year-old.
Acapulco, far from the golden age
One night, Hurricane Otis ripped out and scattered the pages of Acapulco’s Golden Book, written with vacationing Hollywood stars in the mid-20th century.
Tarzan-Johnny Weissmüller had a house there. The then ordinary Senator John Kennedy spent his honeymoon there with Jacqueline Lee Bouvier and Liz Taylor married there for the third time.
Acapulco served as the backdrop for a 1963 film (“Fun in Acapulco,” 1963) in which Elvis Presley jumps from the famous Rock, a natural diving board 150 feet above the cliffs and waves of the Pacific. “The film was shot in Acapulco itself and at Paramount Studios in California. Elvis Presley did not set foot in Mexico,” specifies the trade magazine AlloCiné.
In 1997, a previous hurricane – Paulina – devastated the city, claiming more than 200 lives.
Barely recovered, the tourist port in the Mexican Pacific suffered another setback in the 2000s when violence from drug cartels deterred tourists.
With significant investments and events such as the ATP tennis tournament, which Rafael Nadal won several times, Acapulco seemed to regain its place on the map of tourist destinations in Mexico, along with Cancún, Oaxaca and the Yucatan Peninsula.
This time Hurricane Otis spared nothing, neither the tennis court nor the golf course, nor the beaches covered with trash, animal corpses and clothing, nor the seaside homes.
The damage costs could amount to around 15 billion US dollars, according to an initial assessment by a risk analysis expert from the company Enki Research, which is cited by several media outlets, including the financial agency Bloomberg.
The insurance companies are waiting for figures from an expert commission.