In Los Flamingos Hotel, a one-time Hollywood hangout in Acapulco, Mexico, the pink paint and a few framed photos of the stars are all that escaped Hurricane Otis unscathed. Miguel Ángel, the manager, has been patching it up in the hope of reopening – at least partly – before Christmas. The high season should have been in full swing by now. “If the tourists don’t come, I don’t know what we’ll do,” he says, his optimism faltering for a moment.
During the early hours of 25 October, Otis hit Acapulco as the strongest hurricane ever to land on Mexico’s Pacific coast. It had intensified exceptionally quickly, meaning that few of Acapulco’s 850,000 people were able to evacuate. Most hunkered down in their homes and hotels as 165mph winds lashed the city. Eighty people were reported dead or missing. Preliminary estimates of damages and losses range up to £12.8bn.
“In the first few days after, there was no authority. All basic services were offline,” says Naxhelli Ruiz, an expert in disaster response at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “What we saw was catastrophic – like Japan in 2011 or Indonesia in 2004.”
One month on, much basic infrastructure has been restored. But the government’s response has been slow – hindered by recent institutional changes – and uneven, focusing on Acapulco’s coastal tourist area but not on poorer neighbourhoods, and still less on communities outside the city.
The messaging from the government has minimised the scale of the disaster, declaring an end to the emergency after just two weeks.
“Catastrophes are always complicated. There will always be criticisms and there will always be political costs,” says Ruiz. “But from my point of view, the responses to previous disasters were without doubt better.”
Walking along Acapulco’s coastal boulevard, there are signs of normality returning. Most of the debris has been cleared, and traffic flows steadily. Pharmacies, supermarkets, restaurants, banks and petrol stations are doing business again.
A few high-rise hotels remain boarded up, but others are alive with activity as crews work to clean the rooms. The exteriors still bear the mark of Hurricane Otis; some look as if they have been raked by giant claws, with windows shattered, panelling stripped and air-conditioning units hanging out like entrails.
On a Sunday lunchtime, the beach was busy with people playing music and enjoying drinks. One group played tennis on a court surrounded by piles of debris as another group jogged along the seafront, training for a marathon in the northern city of Monterrey.
The picture was very different in Zapata, a working-class neighbourhood separated from the beach by a 3km tunnel. Piles of debris lined the streets, some of which were still flooded after the canal burst its banks.
Lubia Bernal and José Luís Palacios, both teachers, pointed to the mark the water had left on the wall of their house – reaching well above their heads.
Electricity was restored after nine days but power was still sporadic, they said. Officials had come to note the damage, but it was unclear what help they would get and when. Their neighbours had hired machinery to clear their own street, moving the debris to the canal’s bank, which was clogged with mud and waste.
“Before, the canal was a few metres below the wall,” says Palacios. “Now you could just walk across it.”
José, their 18-year-old son, led the way to the local state school, where a sticker on the gate indicated officials had visited to assess the damage. However, some parents insisted the authorities had been of little help. The ground was still covered in mud, branches and broken glass. Inside the classrooms, desks were scattered. José said students who had missed a whole year of classes during the pandemic were now expecting to miss more.
Outside the city, in the coastal town of Barra Vieja, the schools were also closed, but people seemed more preoccupied with the economy and their health. The hurricane had pulled the roofs off their houses and destroyed the beach restaurants they depend on. Queues of people snaked out of a basketball court repurposed as a triage centre.
Nicolás González Morales, a community leader, said it had taken a week for any supplies to be delivered after the hurricane and 18 days for electricity to be restored.
“In those first weeks, we had to sleep outside because of the heat, battling mosquitoes.” González gestured towards the queues. “You can see how much help we still need. There are lots of people with diarrhoea, fever, dengue.”
The hurricane destroyed many health centres in rural communities and others are closed due to a lack of staff and supplies. NGOs like Medical Impact have stepped in. Gabriel Hernández, its medical manager, said people were losing control of chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension, catching stomach infections from bad water and food, and that mosquitoes were flourishing in the water-filled streets. In one room at the makeshift clinic, a doctor performed an ultrasound on a heavily pregnant woman.
“More people are going to die from illness in the coming weeks and months than died during the hurricane,” says Hernández. “We need to highlight what’s happening in these communities, where no one has insurance or a plan B. If something isn’t done to help them, they’ll live with the damage for a long time.”
According to Naxhelli Ruiz, the lack of speed and coordination in the government’s response is in part down to two recent policy changes.
The first came at the end of 2018, with institutional changes in who would lead disaster response. Until then, the national civil protection system and its state-level branches had coordinated such responses, calling on the armed forces for manpower. By contrast, the armed forces hold the leadership role – even though they have neither the specific training nor the local knowledge to carry it out.
“We used to have a decentralised, multi-actor system,” says Ruiz. “Now we have a centralised and militarised response.”
The second change came in 2021, when Fonden, the disaster fund, was dissolved. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador justified this, citing problems with corruption. Ruiz says those criticisms were founded – but the answer was not to get rid of the fund but to reform it.
The fund had made more money available to respond to disasters quickly and over the long term. Without it, there are still resources to respond to smaller, annual disasters, such as tropical cyclones, landslides and flooding – but not a category 5 hurricane.
Otis was the first such event since those changes were introduced. “Events like this are not unexpected,” says Ruiz. “And the government’s response to this catastrophe was to be expected, too, given these changes.”
López Obrador has promised to get Acapulco “back on its feet” in time for Christmas. A £2.7bn aid plan was published in early November, which includes payments for damaged homes, loans for small businesses and free electricity for several months, as well as weekly food packages and replacement household appliances. The focus was money and security, with no mention of health or education.
“Some of these could help,” says Sebastián Rodríguez, who manages Oxfam México’s team in Acapulco. “But it’s not really clear how this plan is going to be developed. They need to ensure help gets to those that need it most.”
Ruiz also highlighted the lack of mechanisms to ensure transparency and concerns that relief and reconstruction efforts could be twisted to political ends. “I think it’s extremely worrying that the 2024 budget does not contain a particular fund or sum dedicated to this,” says Ruiz.
The fact that the government’s efforts have focused on the coastal area of Acapulco reflects the priority: to revive tourism and, therefore, the economy. Acapulco has long been one of Mexico’s top beach destinations. In its heyday, it was a playground for the international elite. Recently, tourism in Acapulco has been predominantly national. Meanwhile, the city has become a hub for illicit activities. It is often ranked among the world’s most violent, and the municipality has more people in extreme poverty than any other in Mexico.
In this complex context, experts point out a risk of funds for a multibillion-dollar reconstruction being diverted through organised crime, corruption and conflict of interest. On 23 November, a special commission was established to monitor the rebuilding of Acapulco, including senator Félix Salgado Macedonio, father of the current governor of Guerrero. Neither the state nor federal government responded to requests for interviews.
Another question is whether the goal of reconstruction should be to return Acapulco to what it was – or whether this should be taken as a chance to change the social and economic structure of the city.
“Guerrero is one of the states with the greatest inequalities in Mexico, including extreme poverty and lack of social services,” says Blanca Meza, from Oxfam México. “We need to recognise that. Otherwise, the inequalities will simply be reproduced.”
Many fear that Acapulco will simply return to its original form, without dealing with its structural problems. “I hope I’m wrong, but I think we will see many people displaced because there won’t be an economic base that offers work,” says Ruiz. “I think we will see a big exodus from the city.”
