By Emily Green and Ana Isabel Martinez
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -Five days after historic floods that killed at least 66 people and affected 100,000 homes, Mexico is still scrambling to get help to the worst-hit communities and locate 75 missing people amid criticism of the government’s handling of the crisis.
After a year of meteoric approval ratings, the disaster is a test for Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum, who has encountered rare hostile crowds and heckling on visits to affected areas.
The disaster began when torrential rains in the central and eastern parts of the country set off landslides, caused rivers to overflow and bridges to collapse. Whole streets were washed away.
Antonio Ocaranza, a political analyst based in Mexico City, said that while he has been impressed by Sheinbaum’s willingness to be on the ground during the recovery, it belies a bigger problem.
“There is a problem of competence in the initial reaction to the tragedy,” he said, adding that officials were slow in providing necessary machinery to some areas.
SCRAPPING OF DISASTER FUND
The disaster has also fueled questions about the government’s reliance on the military to handle a growing list of responsibilities, from managing airports to constructing major infrastructure projects and distributing disaster relief.
Sheinbaum’s predecessor and political mentor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, spearheaded the elimination of the country’s Natural Disaster Fund (Fonden), saying it was beset by corruption. Sheinbaum defended that decision, saying on Tuesday that “defending Fonden is like defending corruption.”
But the dismantling of Fonden has raised questions of where her government will find the money needed for the response.
She said the federal government has 19 billion pesos ($1.03 billion) available for emergencies, of which around 3 billion pesos have been used. “There are sufficient resources to address the emergency.”
On Wednesday, in the state of San Luis Potosi, Sheinbaum said government aid would be given in two stages: cleanup, which she said would happen next week, followed by “support” depending on the damage suffered by each home. After that, the government would help with roads and drainage.
In 2023, following the devastating Hurricane Otis in the resort town of Acapulco, the government gave cash transfers of between $400 and $3,250 per affected household depending on the level of damage.
Deputy Gibran Ramirez of the opposition center-left Citizens’ Movement party criticized the government’s response to the latest disaster as unprepared and “lamentable.”
“There’s no capacity to respond. It’s always the same response – improvisation,” he said. “And just like in Guerrero after Hurricane Otis, the government will make direct cash transfers to calm the social anger.”
FLOODS CAME WITHOUT WARNING
The floods largely caught the government flat-footed. “There were no scientific or meteorological conditions that could have indicated to us that the rainfall would be of this magnitude,” Sheinbaum told reporters on Monday, adding that the government had been focused on two separate storms off the Pacific coast.
The torrential rains off the Gulf Coast came toward the end of the rainy season, battering land and bursting rivers that had already been soaked by months of rain. The worst-affected states are Veracruz, Hidalgo and San Luis Potosi.
On Sunday, Sheinbaum confronted an angry crowd of people searching for their relatives in the southeastern state of Veracruz, where at least 29 people have died. Some yelled that they had been in the zone for three days looking while others pushed photos of missing people at her.
Struggling to make herself heard, Sheinbaum said: “Everyone will be attended to. We are not going to hide anything.”
($1 = 18.4613 Mexican pesos)
(Reporting by Emily Green and Ana Isabel Martinez; additional reporting by Lizbeth Diaz)
