Mexico buries its dead, finds living amid debris
4 pulled from quake rubble; Hurricane Katia strikes coast
JUCHITAN, MEXICO » Amid the sounds of snare drums, saxophones and sobbing, Mexicans on Saturday began mourning some of the 66 dead after a onetwo 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 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 fromthe 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 neighborhood 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 neighbors tried to dig her out, but weren’t able to recover her body until the next morning when civil defense 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 Peña Nieto said late Friday in an interview with the Televisa news network. Part of the city hall collapsed.
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 defense coordinator, Jose Antonio Marin Lopez, said similar searches had been going on all over the area.
Teams found bodies in the rubble, but the highlight was pulling four people, including two children, alive from the completely collapsed Hotel Del Rio, where one woman died.
“The priority continues to be the people,” Marin said.
In addition to the deaths in Juchitan, nine other people died in Oaxaca, while twenty- five people were killed by the quake in neighboring states. Two others died in a mudslide in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz after Hurricane Katia hit late Friday.
Peña Nieto said authorities were working to re- establish supplies of water and food and provide medical attention to those who need it. He vowed the government would help rebuild.
Power was cut at least briefly to more than 1.8 million people due to the quake, and authorities closed schools in at least 11 states to check them for safety.
The Interior Department reported that 428 homes were destroyed and 1,700 were damaged just in Chiapas, the state closest to the epicenter.