Wednesday, November 07, 2007

from the Washington Post





A man is pulled from fetid floodwaters in Villahermosa. The disaster is one of the worst in Mexican history.

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 7, 2007; A01

VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico, Nov. 6 -- Roofs rot underwater, stretched out by the thousands over miles and miles. But it is the roofs jutting just above the brown, stinking floodwaters that truly make the heart ache.

Those roofs are makeshift homes now, refuges for weary men, women and children too scared to leave behind what little they have. The streets below are liquid highways clotted with dugout canoes, but the people up on the roofs and in the fetid second-story rooms just watch them go past.

"They'd take everything if I weren't here," Manuel Vázquez said Tuesday as he clung to a railing above his waterlogged Villahermosa home. "I'm resigned to staying here."

When the Grijalva River turned vicious over the weekend, when it slipped over its banks and ran wild across the state of Tabasco, its brown waters exposed a socioeconomic divide far deeper than its channel. The flood that President Felipe Calderón called "one of the worst natural disasters in Mexican history" swallowed a place called Gaviotas Sur. It has long been a place where the poor of Villahermosa hacked through flood-prone jungle to clear space for cinder-block shacks and corrugated metal lean-tos.

The rich and middle class of this city live north of the river. The rest live south of it, in Gaviotas Sur -- or as some here call it, "the Bronx." In much the same way as the ruined Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans forced the United States to face its class divide after Hurricane Katrina, Gaviotas Sur is exposing uncomfortable truths in this boggy Gulf of Mexico state.

"The message is that we are poorer than we thought," said Raúl Abreu Lastra, a native of Tabasco and founder of a Mexico City research group, Fundaci¿n Idea, which examines poverty and education. "We have thousands of people living down by the river who shouldn't be living there."

The perilous nature of life here crystallized last week. Torrential rains battered Tabasco, swelling the rivers that crisscross Mexico's most perpetually soggy state. By early Friday, the Grijalva, which runs fast and deep through downtown Villahermosa, and other rivers were cascading over their banks and hitting hardest in poor, low-lying areas such as Gaviotas Sur.

The homes of as many as 1 million people have been destroyed or heavily damaged in the days since by floodwaters that rose as high as 19 feet. Water levels have subsided in many areas. Still, Gov. Andrés Granier estimated Tuesday that the flooding has caused $4.7 billion in damage to homes, as well as banana fields and cattle ranches.

The death toll has been surprisingly low -- three reported killed and 14 to 16 missing and feared dead in a mudslide in the village of San Juan Grijalva, in Chiapas state, south of Villahermosa. But the widespread displacement and misery rival the worst of the natural disasters, including hurricanes, that Mexicans have seen over the years.

Even as downtown Villahermosa was drying out Tuesday, fast currents of water -- pushed by the strength of the nearby river -- were sloshing carcasses of chickens and cows through the squalid neighborhoods still drowning in 10 feet of water in Gaviotas Sur. It may be weeks before all the water is gone, local officials say, and years before the region recovers economically.

Thousands of people line up each day, some waiting until the wee hours, to get food and water in this city, which means "beautiful town" in Spanish. A massive relief effort is underway, but in the past few days, as some stranded residents have been spotted drinking polluted river water, there has been a growing chorus of complaints about distribution problems.

Tabasco is Mexico's fourth-poorest state, with 59 percent of the population below the poverty line, according to Mexico's National Center for Policy Evaluation and Social Development. But the river made the poverty less obvious, separating its day-to-day face from people living in better conditions on the other side.

Another reason for the low profile of Tabasco's poor is that the state, unlike other disadvantaged spots in Mexico, sends relatively few migrants to the United States. The migratory phenomenon is something of a mystery, though locals say Tabasco has always tended toward insularity, dating to the 1800s, when swamps and rivers cut it off from the rest of Mexico.

For those not willing to swim -- though many here are willing -- the only way into impoverished Gaviotas Sur is by boat. By early Tuesday morning, hundreds of people had lined up along the banks of the Grijalva River, pleading for rides in dugout canoes, flat-bottom motorboats and homemade vessels crafted from wooden planks, wire and plastic water-cooler bottles.

Emma Alvarado Rodríguez flagged a ride on a boat donated by an oil services company and pointed to the deepest corner of Gaviotas Sur. She had been coaxed out of her home by Mexican military rescue crews over the weekend. On Monday, she took a canoe and made it up to her roofline, only to be startled by what she said was a tlacuache, a marsupial creature similar to an opossum that plays a role in many indigenous legends. Terrified, she jumped back into her canoe and left.

On Tuesday, she tried to make it back with her two sons.

The oil company boat passed over streets that had buckled under the force of the water, leaving great slabs of asphalt titled toward the sky, forming mini-waterfalls on city streets. The stench of rotting animal carcasses was in the air; the sun beating down on spilled oil made murky rainbows in the water. Her ears were assaulted by the whines and howls of skinny, stranded dogs, some left tied to posts and struggling to keep their mouths and noses above water.

"I still can't believe it," she said.

Alvarado Rodríguez, who sells soft drinks for a living, had placed a big order the day before the Grijalva broke loose. What little money she had is gone. She has not a single peso.

"Maybe," she said, "there will be something at the house that survived, something I can sell."

She waved as the boat pulled away, leaving her to scavenge with her sons.

"Everything is going to be all right," she called out.

On a rooftop about a mile away, Maria Mai Bautista and her husband fed a rooster with chicken feed that had turned soupy in the floodwater. Her husband, Néstor Daniel Vera Murillo, built the house now steeping below them in the slimy water delivered by the channel-hopping Grijalva River.

"Of course, we're going to fix this place," she said. "Where are we going to go if we don't? We can't afford to live someplace pretty."

She slumped back in a chair that displayed the various heights of the flood with stains like rings on a tree trunk. Her eyes reddened, but she fought back the tears. In seconds, she was on her feet, searching beneath a blue tarp, searching for something worth saving.

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