The Long Night of Acapulco: "I'm Powerful with a Gun, I'm Nobody Unarmed"

Acapulco is afraid of the dark. Hurricane Otisturned off all the lights more than a week ago, and as of Saturday, the vast majority of neighborhoods are still surviving in darkness. The inhabitants have had to learn to grope their way around and adapt their clock to the sun. For the first few nights, a pack of men out of necessity ransacked every last tent. There are no supermarkets or pharmacies and only a few gas stations are beginning to regain supply. You need everything. Since then, the Army has guarded all the establishments that were assaulted with rifles in plain sight; Now, there's nothing left. In the poorest neighborhoods, rumor and paranoia have spread. At night, dozens of groups of citizens patrol the streets — some armed with machetes and guns — terrified of the risk of losing what little the storm left them, illuminated by flashlights, torches and burning pyres of garbage.

The nights go on forever and the neighbors sleep with one eye open. The barking of dogs, the motorbikes whizzing in the early hours of the morning, the rustling of the wind through the rubble: any noise sets off alarm bells. Paranoia grows every day that power is not restored — and bringing power back to an entire city and its surroundings is a slow process. For vigilante groups, a sort of makeshift vigilante group, any stranger is guilty until proven guilty. They are easily nervous if they see an unfamiliar face, so easy to mistake in the dark.

The problem is the same as always: people are afraid of losing what little they have; the government is not able to guarantee security in a city that has completely collapsed — the official death toll, which has barely moved for days, is 47 dead and 56 missing; And, although most patrols have been formed as a support system between neighbors to prevent looting, an armed group in the middle of a city plunged into darkness works with the same logic as a fireworks fireworks in a fire. Civilian commandos also have the facility of attracting a certain profile of person: violent, megalomaniac, authoritarian, trigger-happy.

"I'm powerful with a gun, unarmed I'm nobody.

Gustavo (48 years old) blurts out the phrase and assures with a very serious face that he is hiding a gun, although journalists do not see weapons anywhere. It's not like they're asking him to teach it, either. The man is wearing no shirt, only shorts and flip-flops, and is sitting next to a dozen people on a dirt road, blocked at one of its entrances by a mountain of rubble. It is illuminated only by the light of a long candle. There is no moon and the night is so dark that 10 meters away, if the flame is out, no one can see them. The San Nicolás neighborhood, in Pie de la Cuesta, next to Acapulco, only has light from the street lamps at some points on the main avenue. The rest of the town is completely in darkness. Gustavo is not from here, but from Tres Palos, on the other side of the bay, but he has come to see his relatives. His history as a vigilante began after Otis:

"The boss gave me a parcel: he gave me a gun registered in his name because I know about weapons. Four luxury cars arrived, people who don't need it, and they wanted to open the Fix [a chain of hardware stores], so I grabbed myself with bullets. They ran away and from then on I made myself known in the colony. I think my neighbors are grateful because at night, as I have experience, I would hide and see the cars that wanted to park and open the businesses. I chased them at gunpoint and it went well for me financially, I'm not complaining, I took advantage of the situation a little bit. Of course, always in favor of the citizen, of the friends, I tried never to overdo it with anyone.

Imelda, a resident of Pie de la Cuesta, lights up the street with a candle due to the lack of electricity in the area. Gladys Serrano

Beside him, all the faces remain serious except for that of Imelda (37), who offers a slightly kinder account: "As in all places, there is organized crime here. We have to take care of each other. They have already looted Bodega Aurrera, shopping centers, pharmacies, obviously people are now looking for appliances, although I don't know what they are going to be used for because everything got wet, everything was under water," he says. "You wake up all the time, you hear noise, you hear the dogs are barking desperately, and that's the moment you get up to see what's going on. A lot of motorbikes can be heard in the early morning. There is nothing left for us to do but take care of each other, feed each other and lend each other a hand, there will be no other way. Most of us here are family, we are a small neighborhood, we all know each other, when someone strange comes in that's where we put ourselves," he clarifies.

"There is a lot of looting, unnecessarily, I say, because they sold out the stores where we could stock up on food: beans, rice, the most basic things, and today we are suffering a little from the consequences. We are here more than anything to take care: we realized that some neighbors broke into the houses, we are going to watch until dawn and, there, to rest," says Gustavo. Imelda defines it as "the rapine of the little rat": "The fucked up guy who fucks up the fucked up, the one who didn't manage to steal anything, is going to start looking in homes that did."

"We're all in need, we're all hungry"

Life is not being easy these days for the humble neighbors of Acapulco. Most of them eat from the food provided by the government as they try to rebuild their homes. Many survive on tourism in a city that, after the devastation of the hurricane, will take years to fully recover its main source of income. "Right now we are going back to the old days: walking under the sun's rays to go for the water that Sedena [Ministry of Defense] is giving us; forage for food and ice to sustain them; The lagoon right now is not giving the fishing we would like, yesterday we went fishing and caught four mini fish. We do have firewood because the trees were knocked down. We're all in need, we're all hungry. We don't ask for more than the roofs right now. Our mattresses, look, we dry them, there's no fuss, but we want a roof over our heads because we're sleeping in the open."

The fear of looting encompasses different and complex stories, faces that do not fit into a single logic, people who have lost everything. Bertha Nazario, 35, starts crying almost the second the camera turns on. His feelings run high: during the day he doesn't allow himself a moment of weakness, but the moment someone asks him how he's doing, it's as if a retaining wall bursts. She, her eight-month-old baby, her 14-year-old son and her husband have taken refuge in the hotel where she works. Their house sank in the hurricane. "It took us a long time to get what we had," he laments. What they had: a log cabin with a palm leaf roof and a few appliances; A precarious, miserable home, but home nonetheless. "Imagine what it's going to cost us now."

The family has barricaded itself in the complex of tourist villas where Nazario works and they are working hard to protect it from hypothetical thieves and make it ready for the tourists of the future. Their employment is pretty much the only thing they can hold on to. "The day is very fast, the night is very slow. We don't prepare for this kind of occasion, we never imagined it. We are in the hotel for three things: one, for work, because we have to keep going, we have no support from anyone but ourselves. The second is fear of looting: for several days now, people have had no support and are looking for food and a way to sustain themselves, to take refuge. The third: as support, the lady [the owner] is lending us a little roof to stay in while all this is regularized and we can start to build again."

There are those who see soldiers protecting supermarkets that don't have a single can of canned food left on the shelves seems like a bad joke; Especially while in the streets the piled up garbage decomposes more and more every day without anyone picking it up and threatens to become a serious risk to public health in the form of diseases. Among the rubble of a robbed Oxxo, a woman mumbles curses under her breath as she tries to clean up the family business. On the other side of the street, soldiers patrol. "When they looted everything, they were there and they didn't do anything," he murmurs. After taking out a few cartons, the only thing left in the store, he ceases his efforts. It would take an industrial hose to rip the mud crust out of the ground and the rotten smell. Instead, he lights a cigarette, sits on a bench in the doorway, pulls out a pocket Bible, recites a psalm.

A woman guards a looted Oxxo store in Pie de la Cuesta, (Guerrero state). Gladys Serrano

Subscribe hereto the EL PAÍS Mexico newsletter and receive all the key information on current affairs in this country