In a city without water, electricity or gasoline, where desperate people have been allowed, even encouraged, to take essential goods from damaged stores since Hurricane Otis smashed Acapulco, state police officer Raul Gallardo stood guard over a mountain of excess.
Gallardo explained the distinction authorities have been making — in some cases — between what people can take and what would end up in his pile.
People can take “what you can consume — water, tuna, mayonnaise, that you can take,” he said.
Photo: Reuters
What is not allowed are big-ticket items — “appliances, for example,” he said, swiveling to point at the refrigerators behind him. “What’s not within the basket of basic foodstuffs, you can’t take.”
Despite government promises that aid was on the way in a big way, people did not wait.
Acapulco’s desperate residents cleaned out the city’s largest stores in three days. It was not isolated to any particular neighborhood or carried out under cover of darkness, but widespread and in full view of authorities, who have conceded that they do not have the resources or in most cases the will to intervene.
Photo: Reuters
It is in part the result of a government reaction delayed by the historically fast strengthening of a storm that no one forecast to go from tropical storm to catastrophic Category 5 hurricane in 12 hours. It is also a continuation of a government strategy that addresses problems — drug violence, natural disasters — with personnel, but not necessarily the tools to resolve the situation.
At least 27 people died in the storm, but hundreds of people on Friday were still searching for loved ones.
Gallardo was evasive about whether the goods he and other police and the Mexican National Guard troops were guarding in a parking lot at an intersection on a main boulevard had been seized or just abandoned because of their weight.
There were cases and cases of beer, a big purple recliner, a rolling desk chair, a pink loveseat and bottles of whisky.
Throughout Acapulco, people could be seen pushing shopping carts full of goods. Large items were strapped to the roofs of cars. One man on a motorcycle was pulling an improvised sled full of what appeared to be bedding as it fishtailed down a muddy street.
Gasoline has been unavailable, not because there is not any, but because there is no electricity to operate the pumps.
On Friday, a line of hundreds of people ran outside a supermarket in a seaside working class neighborhood where men had broken open a gas pump and were filling up people’s empty plastic bottles.
Most families anxiously hunted for water, with some saying they were rationing their supplies. The municipal water system was out because its pumps had no power.
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