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The two deaths of Angie: the mystery behind the man who lived under the subway bridge that collapsed

2021-05-15T00:35:11.315Z


Miguel Córdova, alias 'Angie', had been presumed dead by his family seven years ago, but a video about what happened the night of the collapse of Line 12 put his face in all the news


Still from the video where Miguel Córdova appears, on May 8 NOISE ON THE NET

Miguel Córdova wanted to be dead, especially for his family.

Knowing that there was a tombstone with his name in his town, Olcuatitán (Tabasco), reassured him.

He fled there at the age of six in a trailer that left him in Lake Texcoco, about 30 kilometers northeast of the capital.

Then he went to Guanajuato, Monterrey, Tijuana and thus he moved through the rest of the Republic looking for life.

Angie, as she likes to be called after her grandmother Angelica, is 36 years old.

He lived under the column that broke the night of the metro tragedy in Mexico City, on May 3.

And until recently, in addition to being dead to his people, he was one of those individuals invisible to the capital, a pauper.

More information

  • What went wrong?

    The doubts and hypotheses behind the tragedy in the Mexico City metro

  • A class action lawsuit asks for more than six million pesos for each of the 26 killed in the subway collapse

Angie went from being dead to having a price put on her head.

A Mexican news channel

Ruido en la Red

interviewed him one day after the accident as one more witness to what happened, but his critical, coherent and sensible testimony, which led to thousands of comments on the networks, elevated him to the viral phenomenon.

Angie was suddenly the best-known man on Tláhuac Avenue.

And a businessman and former undersecretary of Tourism of the capital, Simón Levy, came to offer up to 8,000 pesos (about $ 400) to whoever found his whereabouts.

And as if it were an exotic creature, the hunt began.

"It was a desperation of the children and of the people who screamed when the #MetroCDMX collapsed".



This week Miguel, or Angie as he likes to be called, stole our hearts with his story about the tragedy of @MetroCDMX pic.twitter.com/Da2iI1WWLL

- Noise on the Net (@RuidoEnLaRed) May 9, 2021

When she woke up the morning after appearing all over the national press, Angie didn't know what was going on. They took pictures with him, invited him to eat. No one had ever treated him so kindly in his life. The reporter who interviewed him on video that day and who followed him days later, Ruth Muñiz, tells this newspaper that they found him in

shock

. A neighbor in a store had invited him to come in and promised him money, 15,000 pesos ($ 750). “For someone who has been invisible for so long, this doesn't seem normal. I was really scared, ”recalls Muñiz.

The news did not take long to reach Tabasco. His family had buried Miguel Córdova seven years ago and now his face was all over the news. According to the relatives, the State Prosecutor's Office had handed them in 2015 a dismembered body with the name of Miguel, with similar characteristics, even with the same tattoo, but with a disfigured face. These days, the state authorities have reopened the investigation folder in the face of such a scandal. And his brother Eusencio asked on Twitter to find him "to go get him."

But Angie didn't want anyone to be looking for her. And he didn't want the money either. He did not trust anyone, least of all his family. According to a second interview with

Ruido en la Red

, Córdova had fled from a very young age due to "problems with his father" that still hurt him. He comes from a family of nine siblings whom he hardly knew and where there was not even "a gram of salt to throw at the taco." His life had been the street and that is how he wanted it to continue.

The reasons Angie ran away from home are unclear. His family has offered different versions of what happened: that he did it at age 18, fleeing from a seminary in Tabasco due to a possible homicide; others have linked it to a problem with organized crime; others with the death of their father. The testimonies of relatives have multiplied both these days and the number they are, his mother had 13 siblings. He pointed out a land problem with his family and that is why they were interested in his being dead. His brother Eusencio asked him through an interview with the

Millennium

television network

that, if he did not want to return, "his reasons will have", but at least he would call his mother to tell her that he was fine.

The only thing that seems certain in Córdova's journey is that he did not want anything that happened to him in these weeks. Calls and messages for help cascaded into the inboxes of the channel that made him famous, and the outlet tried to channel all the support. “We tried to explain to him what was happening and that there were many people who wanted to help him, even from the United States they offered him work. In the end, they informed us that he had agreed to go to a shelter where they were going to help him start a new life, "he says. The broadcast of the video had made it impossible for him to sleep peacefully on the street without being chased.

Angie made a living every day collecting cans and cardboard and selling them she made enough to eat, about 20 pesos (one dollar). The night of the subway collapse, I was with some friends a few meters from the beam that shook and crashed the Line 12 car split in two to the ground - 26 people died and almost 80 were injured. He had heard the noise and ran to protect himself. The images of dozens of people trapped and hundreds running desperately, he could not get out of his head the next day: “I came crying from the Nopalera [subway station], because I thought there are people who did not say goodbye to their family and why an idiocy of our authorities who want to take money to the stock market, buy poor quality materials, "he denounced in the video that made it viral.And his words were replicated thousands of times across all platforms.

“I am happy with five pesos, I do wonders with that. One peso of tortilla, one peso of

chilito

. And it's not bad if I go to a kitchen and ask them to give me a little salt and, if they give me a lemon, I make two tacos. I have two pesos left over to buy a Tang [powdered soda] and I ask for water at gas stations and make myself a soda. And I feel happy. The sadness is inside me, there are things that are not forgotten, ”Angie declared a few days after the whole country searched for him.

This week, Muñiz received the news that Angie had fled - although he prefers not to specify where for safety reasons for him.

The next step was to process his identity document, which he had long lost, and thus be able to look for a better job.

For that, it was necessary to initiate a legal process in which he claimed that Tabasco's death certificate was false.

That Miguel Córdova was not dead.

But what Angie wanted was to disappear, to bury her real name.

Go back to being invisible.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-05-15

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