What Mexico Can Teach Us About Katrina

Chuck Collins
Used with permission

In the last few weeks, Mexicans observed the 20th anniversary of a devastating earthquake that rocked central Mexico on Sept. 19, 1985. Striking near the heart of Mexico City, the 8.1-strength earthquake killed more than 9,500 people and leveled entire neighborhoods in North America's largest metropolis.

Mexicans observed the anniversary by remembering those who had died and reflecting on the dramatic social changes unleashed by the earthquake. For Mexicans, the "terremoto" led to the flowering of a modern democracy movement, a force that many believe eventually toppled the country's corrupt system of one-party rule.

More than 750 buildings collapsed in the earthquake, immediately killing and trapping thousands of people. But the alarming thing for most Mexicans was the stunning lack of any coordinated government response in days and months following the disaster.

Mexicans quickly realized they could not wait for indifferent government officials to take action, so they formed citizen rescue and clean-up brigades. One legendary group of university students, known as the "moles," used hand tools to tunnel under flattened apartment complexes to rescue survivors.

I was a 25-year-old paramedic when I arrived in Mexico City several weeks after the earthquake as part of an American volunteer delegation. Much of the initial trauma had passed, but thousands of people were still homeless, living in tent encampments and bathing in buckets. The most striking thing, however, were the protests. All across the city, I witnessed people marching, rallying and raising hand-made banners with their demands.

There were the seamstresses, impoverished women and girls who toiled in sweatshops, whose stories shocked the nation. After the earthquake, sweatshop owners brought in heavy equipment to rescue their machinery, but ignored the desperate pleas from their trapped workers. This experience politicized the surviving sewing workers to form their own union and demand better conditions.

There were the organized and vocal residents of the Tlatelococo housing development, who survived the pancaking of their buildings but now needed housing. Their organized pressure led to revelations that many of the city's collapsed buildings had been constructed by politically connected developers who ignored building codes.

The earthquake exposed the real priorities of a Mexican governing party more concerned about global trade policy and the economic interests of the wealthy than the lives of ordinary people. Days went by before Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid made any public statement about the earthquake. When he did, he minimized the damage and refused international offers of assistance out of fear that it might jeopardize negotiations over the nation's debt and foreign investments.

Like Hurricane Katrina, the 1985 earthquake dramatized the deep fault-lines in Mexican society along the lines of race and class. It exposed the cronyism between government and private corporations in both the failure to prepare for disaster and in the profiteering from the clean-up. It elevated the issues of democracy and inequality, underscoring the question: what kind of society are we becoming?

In the last few weeks, Mexicans couldn't help but see the parallels between Hurricane Katrina and the 1985 earthquake. "That the poor were the ones that couldn't evacuate (from New Orleans) is something that caught our attention," observed Luis Wintergerst, the director of Mexico City's civil protection program. "The buildings that were in bad shape in 1985 were for the people of lower economic means."

The levels of poverty and inequality in Mexico are stunning and deep. But we can't ignore how, in the last three decades, the United States has also become more of an economic apartheid society. The concentration of wealth and power that exists in 2005 is rivaled in our history only by the grotesque Gilded Age inequalities of the early 1900s. These current disparities of wealth and opportunity are not the result of some natural law, but the outcome of 30 years of economic policies and social spending priorities that have been tilted in favor of wealth-holders at the expense of wage-earners.

Post-Katrina lessons from Mexico include that we cannot ignore those left behind in our economy. We should be vigilant in the coming months as we watch how our government rebuilds the Gulf Coast. But most important, we should ask ourselves why we personally tolerate such extreme inequalities in the richest nation on earth and what we plan to do about it.

 

About the Writer

Chuck Collins is senior fellow at United for a Fair Economy. He is co-author, with Felice Yeskel, of the forthcoming book, Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality and Insecurity (The New Press).