During my nearly 30 years of journalistic work, I saw terrible things and sometimes I was consumed with sadness and great fear. But I, like many other journalists, worked through those experiences and did my job.
But Mexico City’s 1985 twin monstrous earthquakes nearly broke me. The mass death, grief and destruction were almost too much. I experienced the quakes and reported on them for Time. Typically, experts refer only to the first quake of September 19th. It had a magnitude of 8.0, but the next day, another quake struck. It’s dismissed as an aftershock. However, it registered 7.5, the lower end of a major temblor. The official death toll of 10,000 is absurdly low. I know it was several times higher than that. Here is another excerpt from my book that describes some of what I experienced in the immediate aftermath.
Near a factory that collapsed, I noticed a middle-aged man weeping. I approached him, and he told me his daughter was among the workers.
“A lot of us with family in there were digging them out,” he said. “But without equipment, we could not advance much. I could touch my daughter’s hand and talk to her. She got weaker and weaker and finally died today.”
A team of German rescuers using dogs told me they had detected many survivors in factory ruins. “In our country, we have the necessary equipment to save people,” one of the rescuers said, sobbing. “Here, there is nothing. We are seeing people die who should have been saved.”
With the government paralyzed, Mexico City residents quickly organized aid efforts. The rich, middle-class and poor, in an unprecedented show of people power, for several weeks distributed food, clothes and blankets to the thousands left homeless.
The government’s death estimates seemed low compared to the devastation I saw. It turned out there was an effort to obscure the real figures. A chauffeur I had hired told me there was a rumored mass gravesite just outside the city. We headed towards Puebla, then took a dirt road to the reported site. Seeing soldiers deployed, we stopped and walked toward them. With their backs toward us, we were undetected. I saw small dirt piles in two lines that covered about 150 yards each. There were wood scraps tied together to form crosses, marking the mounds as graves.
A woman stood in front of one, she was shaking, moaning and weeping, looking to the sky. I walked to her, and she embraced me, burying her face in my chest. “My little boy is in there,” the woman said, pointing to the grave. “He was just five. Why didn’t God take me instead of him?”
I was overcome by sadness. She and I stood hugging each other for a long time. I had no words to comfort her.
Next, the driver and I walked to a large clearing. What I saw shocked me.
Two rectangular pits, each about one hundred feet by thirty feet, had been dug and partially filled with mangled corpses. A white powder, probably lye, covered them. Within minutes, a large army truck backed up and dumped more cadavers and pieces of human bodies into one of the pits.
Suddenly, two soldiers ran toward us and demanded to know who we were. I told him and asked why people were being deposited in mass graves. Rather than answer, they ordered us to leave.
Ricardo Chavira Chicano 