Natural Hazards Observer
| September 2005 | Volume XXX | Number 1 |
Invited Comment
Mexico as a Living Tapestry
The 1985 Disaster in Retrospect
Yes, 20 years have passed since the twin earthquakes of September 19 (Richter magnitude 8.1) and September 20 (Richter magnitude 7.3) struck Mexico, hitting Mexico City particularly hard, and for many of us who responded to the 1985 events, the memories are still fresh. More poignantly, it is difficult to find a Mexico City resident alive at the time, especially in the downtown zones, who cannot tell you precisely where he or she was at the time of impact, particularly during the first earthquake. The event is a true flashbulb memory for Mexicans, much as the Kennedy assassination remains for many in the United States.
Disaster research is criticized at times for its lack of historical perspective, for its tendency to focus on the events and their immediate impacts rather than on the evolution of the entire society. Metaphorically, if we think of societies as weaving daily tapestries, a disaster is a gash or a sharply discordant thread suddenly introduced into the pattern. Disaster research tends to focus on the gash and its close effects. A 20-year perspective on a disaster, however, literally forces us to see how a society repairs/reweaves itself and moves on. In many cases, the tapestry takes off in a dramatically different direction, with new colors and designs. Such was the case in Mexico after 1985.
Geotechnical Lessons
It would be unfair and partial, however, to go directly to that societal evolution level without acknowledging several of the major but more technical lessons learned from the 1985 event. The first was not so much a new lesson as a paradigmatic reminder of the importance of understanding the seismic resistance of buildings in terms of soil-foundation-structure interaction. Indeed, it is often forgotten by nonspecialists that the epicenters of the two earthquakes were approximately 400 kilometers southwest of Mexico City, in the offshore Michoacán Gap, yet the most spectacular damage occurred in the capital—much of which sits on an old lakebed that greatly magnified and temporally extended the shaking.
Second, the 1985 event confirmed the importance of microzonation because structural failure was so highly variable. That is, some zones of Mexico City, particularly the older city center, suffered conspicuously more than others. Indeed, while everyone in Mexico City at the time knew that they had experienced an earthquake, many were unaware that it was a catastrophe with national implications until they heard or saw coverage from the city’s central zones. In addition, it escaped no one’s notice that fairly new government-contracted buildings were much more prone to damage and collapse than they should have been. The resulting corruption charges reverberated through Mexico City for years.
Third, the event demonstrated the importance of nonstructural aspects of seismic safety. While most attention rightly focused on collapsed or partially collapsed major structures (especially hospitals) that killed hundreds at a time, many more buildings were dangerous and/or unusable for weeks if not months because of internal damage to ceilings, partitions, stairways, plumbing, light fixtures, etc. While everyone remembers the spectacular structural failures, few remember the lost functionality of surviving buildings that so greatly slowed response and recovery.
Fourth, and although little has been done to correct the situation, the 1985 earthquakes underscored the national vulnerability of extreme centralization, allowing a single city to utterly dominate the country socially, economically, and politically. It is truly difficult for outsiders to wrap their minds around the importance of greater Mexico City (with perhaps 30 percent of the national population) to Mexico. The best parallel would be to take New York City, Washington, DC, and Chicago and then cram them into the highly seismic Los Angeles basin, along with Los Angeles (and also make that basin a sinking lakebed).
Mexico as an Evolving Tapestry
Turning now to the earthquakes and Mexico’s societal tapestry, one of the most stunning new threads was the emergence of a responding and effective civil society, especially given the authoritarian 50-year-old PRI- (Institutional Revolutionary Party) State system that was assumed to still control most of Mexican public life in 1985. The ripple effects of a society that self-organized search and rescue, assisted the suddenly homeless, and made demands on, not requests to, their government literally never stopped. These self-organization effects were then multiplied by preexisting neighborhood and popular organizations that supported, assisted, and coordinated with the new groups. And so, the 1985 catastrophe revealed an emerging social and political space outside of government control that allowed a blossoming of Mexican civil society that continues to this day.
More specifically, the 1985 event demonstrated that the authoritarian PRI-State system, which had been seen as both strong and pervasive (it was often called “the Perfect Dictatorship”), was a shell of its former self. In full retrospect, we understand now that the regime had lost its moral legitimacy, especially in Mexico City, with its massacre of student demonstrators in 1968, and it had lost much of its economic legitimacy with its early 1980s mishandling of national finances (particularly the so-called oil boom, which went bust). The economic mismanagement, traditionally assigned to the loan-crazed José López Portillo administration (1976-1982), saddled Mexico with an enormous foreign debt, a kind of only dimly visible financial cancer that slowly began sapping the strength of the entire nation, but especially the PRI-State system.
The 1985 earthquakes, however, revealed the regime as surprisingly impotent, which was reinforced by the denial-ridden and ineffective emergency response of the Miguel de la Madrid administration (1982-1988). This ineffectiveness then morphed into a reactive rather than a proactive recovery effort. Again in retrospect, while the response to the 1985 catastrophe was Mexican society’s finest hour, it was the PRI-State system’s worst.
Much flowed from the Mexican nation’s 1985 realization that the PRI-State system was no longer completely dominant, that as a people they could organize, demand, and even act without fear of draconian governmental reprisals. Nearly every comprehensive scholarly work on Mexico now notes the political and social ramifications of the 1985 disaster, especially the opening of political space, the rise of popular organizations, and the rapid maturation of a Mexican civil society.
The most direct political legacy of the 1985 disaster was the democratization of Mexico City’s municipal government. Prior to the earthquakes, politics in Mexico City had been very top-down and exclusionary. Mexico City residents did not even elect their own mayor. Instead, the president would reward a PRI loyalist with the powerful position of city regent. In addition, the Federal District did not have any elected representation in the Mexican Congress. The 1985 earthquake disaster began to change all that.
While Mexico City had seen growing anti-PRI sentiment since the 1968 student massacre, the post-1985 groundswell in popular mobilization, and self-confidence, forced the PRI-State system to respond to demands for more openness and citizen participation in government at all levels. Indeed, in his 1988 presidential campaign, leftist Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas reflected popular resentment against the old system and won the capital. He may also have won the election nationwide, but we still cannot be certain of that, despite strong hints in the recent memoirs of Miguel de la Madrid. Regardless, the PRI’s Carlos Salinas de Gortari was declared the 1988 winner. To his credit, despite clear evidence of PRI electoral fraud, Cárdenas refrained from calling for street demonstrations that could have turned Mexico City from a reconstruction zone into a combat zone.
Faced with mounting civil society and organizational opposition that the 1985 disaster had accelerated (“loosed” might also be apt), the PRI-State system implemented a series of liberalizing reforms. A 1993 reform law released the Federal Electoral Institute from the fetters of government (and PRI) control, after which Mexican elections became increasingly fair and transparent. In the 1997 midterm elections, for the first time in modern history, Mexico City residents were allowed to elect their own mayor, choosing . . . Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. Those same 1997 elections saw an opposition majority elected to the national Chamber of Deputies, again a first in modern Mexican history.
Finally, three years later in 2000, the Mexican people bid goodbye to the old PRI-State system and voted into the presidency Vicente Fox of the center-right National Action Party (PAN). In retrospect, the 1985-2000 period was remarkable, history-altering, and Mexicans can and should be extremely proud of turning an authoritarian one-party political system into a functioning democracy—peacefully and in less than a decade.
Were all of these cumulatively monumental changes in Mexico the result of the 1985 disaster? No, of course not. Weaving a national tapestry is much too complicated to allow such a facile interpretation of a single event. Was the 1985 disaster important, even crucial, for everything that followed? That answer is definitely yes. Mexico repaired and rewove itself around the gash and hurt of 1985.
Richard Stuart Olson
Department of Political Science
Florida International University
Vincent T. Gawronski
Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences
Birmingham-Southern College
Disaster Research: When the Observer
Leaves You Craving for More
Every other Friday, the Natural Hazards Center distributes an e-newsletter, Disaster Research (DR), which features timely announcements about new policies and programs, funding opportunities, calls for papers and presentations, upcoming conferences, Internet resources, job openings, and other information useful to researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and students in the field of hazards and disasters. The DR complements the Observer and while there is some information overlap between the two publications the DR often contains time sensitive information that the Observer cannot. The Center welcomes and encourages the submission of news, announcements, and questions for DR readers (a readily available network of experts). All contributions and queries for the DR should be indicated as such and e-mailed to hazctr@colorado.edu.
To receive the DR, subscribe for free on the Web at http://www.colorado.edu/hazards/dr/ or send a message to listproc@lists.colorado.edu with this one-line command in the body of the e-mail message (no subject): “SUBSCRIBE HAZARDS [Your Name]” (do not include [ ]).
Call for Quick Response Proposals
Each September, the Natural Hazards Center solicits proposals for the next round of Quick Response (QR) Grants. These small grants are intended to enable social and behavioral science researchers from the United States to conduct short-term studies immediately following a disaster. Grants average between $1,000 and $3,500 and are intended to cover food, travel, and lodging expenses.
If, during the course of the next year, a disaster matching an applicant’s preapproved proposal occurs, the grant is activated and the researcher is able to immediately travel to the site. Grantees are required to submit a report of their findings to be shared with the hazards community. Reports are published by the Natural Hazards Center and are available online.
In recent years, the Center has activated grants studying adaptation to flood impacts in Louisiana, elderly populations in disasters, and providing for pets during extreme events. Proposals for natural, technological, and human-induced events are considered for funding. Physical science- and engineering-based proposals are not eligible. For more information about this program, and to find out how to apply, visit http://www.colorado.edu/hazards/qr/, or request a 2006 QR Program Announcement from Greg Guibert, Natural Hazards Center, University of Colorado, 482 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0482; (303) 492-2149; e-mail: greg.guibert@colorado.edu. The deadline for proposal submission is October 14, 2005.