The bad weather was only one factor that led to the death of at least 375 people and an estimated $2 billion in damage. Population pressure is pushing the Mexican poor into precarious areas where urban planning laws are ignored. Peasants in search of new farmland climb farther up the mountainsides, clearing the trees that hold the soil in place. So when it rains, and the soil reaches its saturation point, the results can be deadly. Says Douglas Meyer of the Nature Conservancy in Washington: “If there aren’t any trees, rains turn pastures and hillsides into mud.”
It is a lesson Latin America has learned several times in the last year. In October 1998 Hurricane Mitch killed up to 10,000 people and wrecked the economies of Honduras and Nicaragua. Those countries are losing 250,000 acres of forest and jungle a year, and some of the worst damage occurred under ravaged mountainsides. The rain liquefied the deforested slopes of the Casita Volcano in Nicaragua, washing away 1,200 people in mud and rubble. The month before, a storm in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas dissolved a hillside, killing more than 100 people.
The pattern continued this month in Mexico. A map of the states badly damaged from the rains fits neatly over one charting deforestation. “Deforestation is without doubt the environmental problem in Mexico with the gravest consequences and highest economic and social costs,” says Gabriel Quadri, an environmental scientist in Mexico City. Some states have lost as much as 98 percent of their forest and jungle cover since midcentury. Almost 100 miles northeast of Mexico City, in the tiny village of Acalama, some of the few survivors were saved by a funeral. They were at the service outside the village when the mountainside above their homes collapsed. An estimated 150 people died. The only section of the mountain still in place is the part where the trees had not been cut.
Researchers say that the term “natural disaster” may often be a misnomer. Rich countries suffer hurricanes, floods and earthquakes at the same rate as their poorer counterparts. But according to United Nations estimates, 90 percent of deaths occur in developing countries. “Poor populations are reduced to living on unstable slopes or in flood plains because that’s the land that nobody else wants,” says Robert Hamilton of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. Across Latin America, settlements pop up in ravines and along riverbeds. In Teziutlan, says city planner Juan Luis Olvera, “We view this as a painful lesson.” It’s one paid in the lives of the poor.
