Mexicans mourn earthquake dead
JUCHITAN, Mexico — Slow-moving funeral processions converged on Juchitan’s cemeteries from all directions on Saturday, so many that they sometimes caused temporary gridlock when they met at intersections.
A monster earthquake and a Gulf coast hurricane have combined to take at least 66 lives in Mexico, and no place suffered more than the Oaxaca state city of Juchitan, where 36 died as buildings collapsed in the magnitude 8.1 temblor.
The graveyard swelled with mourners and blaring serenades for the dead — the sounds of snare drums, saxophones and sobbing. Pallbearers c arried t he c askets 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 neighborhood pharmacy when t he 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 de- fense 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.