Acapulco Bay shrinks underfoot as the helicopter takes off from the naval hospital. From a bird’s eye view, the city this Thursday is a panoramic view of ruins and ghosts after the passage of Otis: the hurricane destroyed the exclusive hotels where the Mexican jet set got drunk on champagne in those eternal nights; Golf courses look like pool tables that someone filled with broken glass; The beaches are empty, some boats drift along flakes; The hills that were once bright green are now sickly brown, the wind tearing away the leaves leaving only the stunted trunks; The poorest neighborhoods have lost their tin roofs and rubble fills the streets; Columns of smoke rise from the irregular settlements on the hills, where their residents light huge bonfires with the garbage brought by the biggest storm the Mexican Pacific coasts have ever experienced; The idyllic postcard of Playa Diamante has left luxury behind and is more reminiscent of a photo of a bombing raid.
The helicopter lands with a crash on the runway of an airport. In a hangar, dozens of Marine Secretariat soldiers unload and stack tons of cans of sardines from a truck that will later be distributed to the most remote rural communities. The city is devastated – the official death toll, which has not been updated for several days, stands at 46 dead and 59 missing – but even inland, Otis has shown no mercy. There are dozens of towns and villages that have been cut off for a week: incommunicado due to power and light outages; no water supply at tap or in shops; without food beyond what they kept in the pantry or what they could hunt, fish, or harvest; Drinking water from rivers and coconuts. The Navy assures that it has been operating about 70 daily flights for several days so that humanitarian aid reaches even the most remote places in Acapulco.
On November 2, a Marine helicopter arrives in San Isidro Gallinero to provide humanitarian assistance. Gladys Serrano
Once the truck is unloaded, the helicopter’s metal belly must be filled: cans, rice, beans, gallons of bottled water, toilet paper, dog food and all the basic products necessary after a disaster like Otis. At around two o’clock in the afternoon the plane takes off for San Isidro Gallinero, a remote community in the mountains with fewer than 3,000 inhabitants. Fly over the Tres Palos Lagoon, which glows a cloudy and wild color in the sun. the green hills; the destroyed cornfields that look like toppled dominoes; The palm trees turned in the direction of the wind, which swept everything in its path at 250 kilometers per hour.
The helicopter’s propellers kick up a huge cloud of dust that shoots towards the residents of San Isidro Gallinero. Hundreds of people wait for the supplies to arrive, sheltered from the sun under umbrellas and what little shade there is, on a kind of dirt soccer field on the edge of town, the only surface flat enough to land on. As the dust clouds clear, the young men form a human chain to unload the boxes of humanitarian aid.
Girls use an umbrella to protect themselves from the dust kicked up by the helicopter. Gladys Serrano
Beans, corn and river water
San Isidro Gallinero is a town of unpaved streets and adobe houses whose roofs are built from materials such as asbestos, a mineral extremely harmful to health. Its inhabitants are farmers who subsist on the corn fields, the lemon and mango trees and the coconuts of the palm trees. The hurricane destroyed their entire crop and thus their only source of livelihood. There has been no electricity or internet for a week, food is scarce and without the reserves of his own crops, hunger would have been a much bigger problem than Otis. Thirst forced them to drink water from rivers and springs.
—Aren’t you afraid of illness?
—It’s better than dying of thirst.
The one who answers is Domingo, who is 57 years old and, like almost everyone here, farms a corn field: “I lost the entire corn field, we need strong help from the government.” The stories are similar: everyone lost their roofs and crops and many of them their entire houses, which were built of mud and wood and could not withstand the onslaught of the hurricane. Like Mary, who saw her mud hut collapse, stone by stone. Now she and 14 other relatives are taking refuge with her mother-in-law in an equally small hut. “We are cramped, we sleep on the floor. Help came [de alimentos] before, but not everyone understands it, there are many of us. At the moment we are in the same situation, they say [los víveres que trae la Marina] They won’t be enough for everyone. People supported us with beans to eat. Our entire harvest is lost. We need help because everything is getting expensive,” he summarizes.
Navy personnel load supplies that will fly by helicopter from Acapulco Airport to San Isidro Gallinero on Nov. 2. Gladys Serrano
Agripino Manzanares (72) smiles under his straw hat. He who lived all his life and planted these mountains was a little luckier than Mary. Otis just ripped off his roof. “The hurricane felt terrible, like a destructive force: blades were flying, trees were being uprooted. In the first days the situation was critical, you see: there is no light, there is no signal, we are all stuck. The good thing is that we are an agricultural city. There is no gas here, but there is firewood, we are not as sad as in the city. Thank God we didn’t starve, but we were cut off, we had three days to clear the road. It was ugly here, we had never experienced anything like this…as they say…this coincidence of something natural.”
In the city, the hurricane was another disaster adding to a long list of extreme poverty and institutional neglect; a misery the size of adobe houses and dirt floors, of elderly people like Manzanares forced to continue working in the fields to eat, and of total dependence on humanitarian aid to survive. Just outside Otis, an earthquake — another in a region accustomed to pounding earth — swallowed dozens of shacks. Manzanares looks to a long-term perspective that goes beyond the Navy’s supplies: “We need the government’s help for our agriculture to be able to replant and cultivate the blighted land to help us harvest.”
On this trip – it is the seventh today – the soldiers do not stay in the city for longer than 15 minutes. When all the boxes are unloaded, the soldiers pose with their neighbors for the official photographer of the body. Someone calls out “Long live the Navy,” which doesn’t sound very spontaneous and is only accompanied by a few applause. The misery of San Isidro Gallinero can be measured in this song, in the half-hearted applause against the hunger of the people who are starting all over again, rebuilding their huts, replanting their crops and thanking the government for a few crumbs of relief you have to for a few days. The poverty of a life of scarcity. As the helicopter takes off, the residents of the village disappear again between the columns of dust.
Marisela Contreras Santos, a resident of San Isidro Gallinero who lost her home in the hurricane. Gladys Serrano
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