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Mexico weighs building violations in quake deaths
Capital prosecutor’s inquiries may lead to homicide charges
MEXICO CITY — It hit the headlines as ground zero of a catastrophe, but the Enrique Rebsamen school soon became a global focus of hope amid the devastation of last month’s 7.1 magnitude earthquake.
Breathless TV reports recounted the inspirational tale of Frida Sofia — the 12-year-old who had miraculously survived in the rubble following the collapse of a school wing that killed 19 fellow students and seven adults.
Alas, the news of Frida Sofia turned out to be fake, the product of misinformation, confusion and a collective desire for an upbeat narrative from the ruins of the Sept. 19 disaster.
Since then the school has come to embody something else — the corruption, backdoor deals and shoddy building practices that authorities suspect contributed to the collapse of dozens of structures and the deaths of at least 369 in the quake.
The school, shuttered and cordoned off by police tape, is now enveloped in a toxic cloud of accusations and ill will. Mexican education authorities have revoked its operating license.
And the school is not the only earthquake-pummeled building here attracting law enforcement attention.
The Mexico City prosecutor’s office says it has opened up almost 150 investigations related to the earthquake, including inquiries into the collapse of 38 buildings in the capital, among them the Rebsamen school. Future criminal charges could include homicide, fraud and negligence, officials say.
Among the areas of inquiry will be whether building owners kept up with bolstering of concrete support columns, other retrofits and assorted safety measures mandated after the 1985 earthquake, which killed thousands here. There is broad suspicion that many property owners failed to maintain their buildings up to code, in some cases paying off inspectors to avoid doing the work.
None of the cases of the downed buildings has been as incendiary as that of the Rebsamen school, with 400 students in a middle-class district in the capital’s southern borough of Tlalpan.
“This is an outrage,” Claudia Sheinbaum, Tlalpan borough chief, told reporters in announcing a criminal complaint for negligence against the school’s owner/director and two former borough officials. “It remains for prosecutors to determine it. But in our minds, yes, the word is corruption.”
Sheinbaum, considered a front-runner in next year’s mayoral elections as a likely candidate for the left-wing Morena party, pointedly distanced her administration from any potential wrongdoing, although she has been in office since 2015. The two borough officials whom she cited worked for a previous administration.
The borough chief cited a series of irregularities, including land-use violations and improper additions to the school. In 2014, the borough official said, the school paid a fine of 21,000 pesos, the equivalent of about $1,400 at the time, to avoid a possible shutdown for illegal construction at the site. The borough chief said investigators would determine whether illegal additions at the school contributed to the disastrous collapse.
Mexico City prosecutors have summoned the school’s director and owner, Monica Garcia Villegas, to appear before investigators. Garcia lived in a rooftop apartment on the school grounds and survived the collapse.
Also among the multiple earthquake incidents attracting police scrutiny are the casualties suffered at another school, the Mexico City campus of the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education. Five students were killed and dozens injured when structures collapsed or buckled on the sprawling campus of the exclusive private institution. Prosecutors are investigating whether construction or maintenance deficiencies contributed to the deaths.
Authorities are also looking at possible “anomalies” in a doomed six-story office building at No. 286 Alvaro Obregon Ave. in the capital’s Roma Sur district. The midday collapse killed 30 men and 19 women.
The death toll at the office building was the highest at any one venue during the earthquake. Only 28 people who had been inside the building when the earth started shaking survived, according to official accounts.
Last week, rescuers pulled out the last body from the building on Alvaro Obregon. That signaled the end citywide of search efforts to recover survivors or corpses from the rubble. This time there would be no miracle survivors, pulled from the wreckage two weeks later. Mexico’s acclaimed searchers, known as topos, or moles, were picking up their gear and leaving the scene.