At the doors of a makeshift morgue by the Government of Mexico City, dozens of shattered families piled up on Tuesday, laden with papers.
Most had been searching through the rubble of the capital's worst tragedy since the 2017 earthquake all night for any indication of their disappearance, running from hospital to hospital with a photo in hand, with the only hope that a logistics error I would have gotten them here.
But all those who congregated in this group wake shared the same tragedy: their dead were inside.
Behind the doors of the Iztapalapa Prosecutor's Office, to the southeast of the city, was the body of Christian López Santiago, 41 years old. A federal government employee of Mixtec origin who had arrived in the capital almost 30 years ago fleeing the misery of the Oaxaca countryside. When his comadre Marisela Alvarado, a former co-worker and friend of the family, saw the cascade of videos of the accident on social networks the night before, he expected the worst. There was no way he wasn't on that train. The alternative for López and thousands of inhabitants of the southeast of the capital who work in the center and north of the city is too cumbersome: more buses, transfers, motorcycle taxis.
At 22:22 this Monday, López was traveling in one of the wagons that suddenly rushed over one of the main avenues on the outskirts of the southern city.
He still had more than half the way to go home: another four stops and a bus ride to complete an hour and a half journey.
Like most of his neighbors, every day he crossed the monstrous Mexican capital almost from end to end to get from his work office to the Chalco Valley where his wife, two daughters, aged 13 and six, were waiting for him.
The accident that claimed the lives of 24 people and left almost 80 injured.
López's body was crushed midway to see his family.
The families of the victims: “It was a foretold tragedy.
Those of us who used that line, we did it with fear "
At least 24 dead in the collapse of a section of the Mexico City metro
Editorial |
'Complete and murderous negligence: let the guilty fall'
The bridge collapsed almost at the intersection between Iztapalapa and Tláhuac.
Two of the largest and most popular delegations in the city.
Between them there are more than two million inhabitants.
Tláhuac, in particular, was for centuries a town of farmers who took advantage of the virtues of a land that floated on a freshwater lake.
With the drying of the lagoon and the urban explosion of Mexico in the 1960s, the town began to receive waves of internal migrants in search of work in the capital who colonized the slopes of the hills and ancient volcanoes with self-built houses.
López was part of that national migrant mass fleeing the poverty of the countryside. He came to the city from the Sierra de Oaxaca when he was only 14 years old with his wife Claudia. They barely spoke Spanish, their mother tongue is Mixtec. And she spent years cleaning houses so that he could study law and break with the macabre Mexican logic of someone who is born poor, dies poor. He got a position as a federal employee in the administrative body of the Secretariat for Citizen Protection. A job for which he did not charge more than 12,000 pesos, less than $ 600 a month. He didn't have a car, his only viable means of transportation was the Mexico City subway.
Tláhuac and Iztapalapa are among the five municipalities that concentrate the most people living in poverty.
Specifically, Tláhuac accumulates almost 40% of its population in a critical situation, putting the scale at a monthly income per family below 5,000 pesos (about $ 250), according to official data from the Government of Mexico City itself.
In Tláhuac, a quarter of the population between six and four years old is not in school and 26% of the homes do not have electricity.
A military man guards the area where the subway car collapsed on line 12 of the subway.Monica Gonzalez / El País
The area where the worst tragedy in the recent history of the capital and the neighboring colonies occurred consists of a network of gray houses that are crowded together in alleys with little order, where even the public transport system seems to have forgotten that people live there. . The subway stops have never been enough for a population that spreads mercilessly to the width to connect naturally with another entity, the State of Mexico. The streets lose name and become numbers, then blocks, then blocks. As if no one had bothered to humanize him. And in this peripheral corner of the southeast of the country thousands of workers essential for the functioning of the center of the capital accumulate.
Facilitating the transfer of that pool of workers was the justification for the construction of line 12, the first expansion of the metro network in the capital since the 90s and the star work of the left-wing mayor (PRD) Marcelo Ebrard, today chancellor and strong man of the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The objective was to provide public transport to this immense wave of workers from the south and connect it with great arteries of the city such as Insurgentes. The announcement came in 2006, when Ebrard had just come to power and was presented as one of the great pending accounts of other Administrations with the popular peripheries of the city.
Four years later, on the edge of Ebrard's term of office, the work was inaugurated in style with the presence of President Felipe Calderón.
Less than half a year later, a part of the line - including the area of the elevated bridge that collapsed this Monday - was suspended by the new capital government.
The then director of the Mexico City Metro, Jorge Gaviño, denounced that the work "was born with endemic problems that will never be solved in its life" and that it would require maintenance "in a permanent way."
The shadow of negligence
José María Bautista, father of Mario Alberto, a 25-year-old computer engineer, was desperately looking for his son Tuesday morning at the Belisario Domínguez hospital. The young man was also returning home from work in one of the wagons. The family spent more than 12 hours without news, until in the afternoon the name of the young man appeared on the list of the deceased published by the city government. After confirming the fatality, Bautista sought explanations: “This is Marcelo Ebrard's fault. He was responsible for this work ”.
What happened this Monday is aimed at increasing the sad tradition of tragedies linked to negligence of the public powers, leaving a trail of helpless victims and another great limbo of political responsibility and accountability in Mexico. In December 2016, more than 300 tons of explosives blew up a fireworks park in the Mexican municipality of Tultepec, leaving 42 dead and almost 100 injured. Two years later, a father and son fell into a sinkhole while traveling along one of the busiest highways for the residents of Mexico City. The hole was cut into the concrete of a road that had been expanded and modernized just a year earlier. Or one of the most painful symbols of the 2017 earthquake: the 19 children and seven adults who died at the Rébsamen school,in Mexico City. Three years after what happened, the Mexican justice certified that the school director and owner of the facilities had illegally expanded and built a floor of more than 230 tons that the foundations could not support.
Since the suspension of the line in 2014, the spiral of cross accusations and investigations in different rooms, which includes the two capital governments and the companies involved, began to grow like a snowball. On the one hand, the consortium in charge of the construction of the work - the flagship construction company of Mexico, ICA, the Mexican subsidiary of the French Alstom and the infrastructure division of Carso, the giant of Carlos Slim - sued the capital government for portraits in the pay. Years later, the consortium itself was also sentenced to pay a fine of 2,121 million pesos for delays, work not executed, and damages in construction.
Cuahutemoc Cárdenas, Armando Ríos Piter, Miguel Ángel Mancera, Carlos Slim, Bernardo Quintero, Earl Anthony Wayne, Jesus Zambrano, Rosalinda Bueso and Marcelo Ebrard, during the inauguration of line 12 of the metro.
The parliamentary commission had established that the budget shot up almost 50% more than expected, to 26,000 million pesos, in addition to detecting a handful of irregularities in the management of resources.
The former director of the Metro Project, Enrique Horcasitas Manjarrez was sentenced to 20 years of disqualification from holding public office.
While the general director of ICA assured that the work was well done and that the problem was the trains, "which are not compatible with the track."
After almost two years of unemployment, the line returned to work after numerous studies and repairs. Until the earthquake of September 19, 2017 hit the line again. The residents of this area had alerted the authorities that the earthquake had visibly affected the structure of the subway, near the point that sank this Monday, which in this section of Tláhuac avenue circulated through a bridge over the Exterior. The capital authorities, already during the administration of Miguel Angel Mancera, then detected damage to the heart of the bridge: column 69, which supported one of the sections of the line, was damaged at the base, and the Collective Transportation System ( SCT) ordered its repair, for which it invested three months of work and 15 million pesos, according to the authorities in January 2018.
Despite the continuous renovations, the residents of the place continued to denounce the poor condition in which it was found with photos published on social networks that showed the deterioration and progressive buckling (bending) of the structure. The current director of the metro, Florencia Serrano, indicated that the last review of the structure of the line was carried out on January 20. "The entire elevated viaduct of line 12 was monitored and there were no anomalies," defended the official, in the spotlight of criticism. The official position, for the moment, has been to rule out any drastic measure until the completion of the external expert opinion that the Norwegian company DNV will be in charge of, completely unrelated to the Mexico metro.
Since its reopening, Line 12 had become the only option for the working class southeast of the capital. And the feeling of pain was mixed with the anger of a social stratum at the doors of the morgue this Tuesday. "We are the ones who always end up paying for the broken plates of the politicians on duty," said Guadalupe, sister-in-law of Liliana López García, 37, another of the victims of the accident, in tears.
Christian López's family had spent all their savings on facing the covid just a few weeks ago.
He fell ill and got sick very quickly.
They hired oxygen, internists and he was unable to work for more than two months.
His salary was the only sustenance for his family.
"It is incredible that a hard-working person has had his life taken from him due to ineptitude," his friend concludes.
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