Quake toll reaches 282; ‘trapped girl’ fictional

MEXICO CITY: Rescuers swarmed over rubble with picks and shovels-yesterday in a torturous search for survivors two days after Mexico’s deadliest earthquake in a generation, while politicians sought to outdo each other in donating party funds to help victims.

As the arduous search through mountains of debris continued, signs of exhaustion crept in following Wednesday’s 7.1magnitude quake that killed at least 282 people, with growing discontent and rumours swirling online.

Mexico’s Navy apologised for communicating incorrect information in a story that captivated the nation about a fictitious schoolgirl supposedly trapped under a collapsed school in Mexico City and dubbed Frida Sofia by local media. The highprofile televised blunder led to an outpouring of anger.

Officials also sought to quash rumours the military would be bulldozing razed buildings deemed unlikely to harbour survivors.

‘‘We won’t suspend the search and rescue mission we’ve been given until we find the last of the survivors,’’ army chief Salvador Cienfuegos said on Twitter.

In hardhit Mexico City, rescue efforts focused on 10 collapsed buildings where people may still be alive. Some 52 buildings fell in the capital alone, with more in the surrounding states. Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said 50 people were still missing.

Working without pause since the massive quake, first responders and volunteers have saved 60 survivors from central Mexico City to poor neighbourhoods far to the south.

Luis Manuel Carrillo Nunez (14) said he was in a yoga class at the Enrique Rebsamen private school when he heard people yell, ‘‘It’s shaking!’’.

He ran to escape the building as it began collapsing. But some classmates never made it out.

‘‘It’s hard to know that you’re not going to see again the friends that you loved. I’m really traumatised,’’ he said.

The full scale of the damage has not been calculated, with buildings across the city of 20 million people badly cracked.

Citigroup’s Mexican unit Citibanamex told clients it was lowering its 2017 economic growth forecast to 1.9% from 2% because of the earthquake.

The quake became more politicised yesterday, with the country’s deeply unpopular parties engaging in a game of oneupmanship to give everhigher percentages of their federal funds to help those afflicted.

Disaster relief is a sensitive issue for politicians in Mexico after the Government’s widely panned response to the 1985 quake caused upheaval, which some credited with weakening the oneparty rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

The PRI said it would give 258 million pesos ($NZ19.8 million), or 25% of the party’s annual federal funding, to help victims.

Meanwhile, the national human rights commission proposed changing the Mexican constitution to divert about 30% of political parties’ funding to a federal disaster fund.

Calls for political pennypinching gained momentum on social media following a powerful quake two weeks ago that killed nearly 100 people in the south of the country. — Reuters