Word: mexicans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dead, were entombed within a 50-ft. honeycomb of debris. Rescuers swarmed over the wreckage. Now and then the demand came for absolute silence as the searchers listened for survivors. Nearly seven days after the quake, wavering cries were heard on what had been the fifth floor. A U.S.-Mexican team of miners tunneled toward the sound--and eventually reached the target...
...experts suggested that the greatest danger to the babies during their ordeal had been cold. Mexican doctors speculated that dying adults in the wreckage near them had shielded the infants from the chill and passed on the margin of warmth necessary for survival. In any case, said Dina Villanueva Garcia, chief of the neonatology department of Juarez Hospital, "it was extraordinary that they survived." In all, about 15 infants and 166 adults had been rescued at Juarez Hospital by week's end, and two babies had been rescued at another hospital after nearly nine days of entombment...
Many of the foreign rescuers had unstinting praise for their Mexican counterparts. But as the week wore on, complaints grew among the outsiders about the disorganization and hesitancy of the Mexican effort. Said a member of a French rescue unit known as Les Taupes (The Moles): "It got to the point where we were practically pleading with the Mexican government to let us save someone." Many Mexicans were equally critical. They wondered, for example, why President de la Madrid had waited 39 hours after the earthquake before addressing the nation on television. The government, said Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, a Mexican...
Among other things, the foreigners echoed complaints by some Mexicans that almost 4,000 troops guarding the devastated areas did little or nothing to assist in the rescue effort. Moreover, Mexican officials were allegedly more anxious to bulldoze ruined buildings than to proceed with the painstaking / rescue work, apparently out of the mistaken fear that decomposing corpses in the ruins would cause epidemics. Carl Heinz Wolbert, a West German police detective and volunteer rescue expert, wept in frustration at the resulting delays. Said he: "We can touch the people who are trapped. In Mexico it is impossible to get them...
...time continued to slip away, the odds against retrieving many more survivors lengthened. That did not stifle the efforts of the rescuers. But as a steady stream of bodies moved toward local cemeteries and damage estimates rose as high as $2 billion to $3 billion, Mexican officials began looking ahead to the next stages of the relief operation, which include relocation and health services for the living and the city's eventual reconstruction. In one sense, Mexico City had been lucky: key industrial sectors of the city were undamaged by the quake, meaning that the impact of the disaster...