Mexico mourns quake dead

Amid the sounds of snare drums, saxophones and sobbing, Mexicans on Saturday began mourning some of the 66 dead after a one-two punch from a monster earthquake and a Gulf coast hurricane.

Hardest hit was Juchitan, a Oaxaca state city where 36 people died when the magnitude 8.1 quake toppled buildings.

Slow-moving slow-moving funeral processions converged on one of Juchitan’s cemeteries from all directions on Saturday sometimes causing temporary gridlock when they encountered each other at intersections.

The cemetery swelled with mourners and noisy serenades for the dead. Pallbearers carried the caskets around rubble the quake had knocked from the simple concrete crypts. Jittery amid continued aftershocks, friends and relatives of the deceased had hushed conversations in the Zapotec language as they stood under umbrellas for shade from the beating sun.

Paulo Cesar Escamilla Matus and his family held a memorial service for his mother, Reynalda Matus Martinez, in the living room of her home, where relatives quietly wept beside her body.

The 64-year-old woman was working the night shift at a neighbourhood pharmacy when the quake struck Thursday night, collapsing the building.

“All the weight of the second floor fell on top of her,” said her son, who rushed to the building and found her under rubble. He and neighbours tried to dig her out, but weren’t able to recover her body until the next morning when civil defence workers brought a backhoe that could lift what had trapped her.

Fearful of crime, the pharmacy kept its doors locked, and Escamilla Matus wondered if that had cost his mother the time she needed to escape.

Scenes of mourning were repeated over and over again in Juchitan, where a third of the city’s homes collapsed or were uninhabitable, President Enrique Pena Nieto said late Friday in an interview with the Televisa news network. Part of the city hall collapsed.

The remains of brick walls and clay tile roofs cluttered streets as families dragged mattresses onto sidewalks to spend a second anxious night sleeping outdoors. Some were newly homeless, while others feared further aftershocks could topple their cracked adobe dwellings.

Rescuers searched for survivors with sniffer dogs and used heavy machinery at the main square to pull rubble away from city hall, where a missing police officer was believed to be inside.

The city’s civil defenceco-ordinator, Jose Antonio Marin Lopez, said similar searches had been going on all over the area.