After Landslide Destroys Village, Poorest of Poor Left Out in Cold in Mexico Judith Matloff - Al Jazeera
go to original November 19, 2013

Very little aid has reached the community which was very poor even before the storm. The villagers struggle to survive in temporary shelters. (Alicia Vera/Al Jazeera)

SAN MIGUEL AMOLTEPEC VIEJO, Mexico — Once this was the poorest hamlet in the country. The people worked in the fields, harvesting the corn that they ate. Few adults could read or write. Houses had dirt floors and lacked indoor plumbing.

That was before Manuel, the mid-September tropical storm that unleashed the earth and smothered nearly all the houses, swallowed their possessions and pushed the inhabitants to the higher ground of a cemetery, where they pitched plastic sheeting on gravestones.

Now the nation’s poorest village doesn’t exist and 336 survivors camp by the roadside under tarps and tin sheets. They borrow food from nearby villages. They don’t know where they will live come winter.

If only they had been tourists.

When Manuel punched the southern state of Guerrero, an area constantly pummeled by earthquakes and storms, the government had no contingency plan. It also put the wealthy first. Authorities quickly mobilized airplanes to evacuate thousands of vacationers who were stranded in the resort of Acapulco for what was a long holiday weekend.

Two weeks later the first shipments of clothing and food from the government finally reached the La Montaña region, one of the nation’s poorest and home to isolated clusters of indigenous people. More than 30 people died during the storm, although miraculously none in San Miguel. The landslide occurred during the day so many were able to get to the sanctuary of the graveyard until waters receded.

But before those shipments, the earliest aid to the region had been spearheaded by a human rights group, Tlachinollan, not the military that has long been accused of raping and harassing locals. Soldiers and government agencies that normally deal with disasters came later.

Activists liken the tardy official response to Manuel as akin to the poor government showing after Katrina in the U.S. They say it shows callousness toward ethnic native groups, who have suffered discrimination since the Spanish conquest more than 500 years ago.

“Authorities are not very interested in helping indigenous people,” concluded Arquimedes Bolito Gonzalez, who is an organizer with Enlace, a worker's rights organization that tries to promote better living conditions among such groups.

Read the rest at Al Jazeera

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