Rains Bring Mexico's Poverty to Surface

Residents Cling To Flooded Homes

VILLAHERMOSA, Mexico, Nov. 6 -- Roofs rot underwater, stretched out by the thousands over miles and miles. But it is the roofs jutting just above the brown, stinking floodwaters that truly make the heart ache.

Those roofs are makeshift homes now, refuges for weary men, women and children too scared to leave behind what little they have. The streets below are liquid highways clotted with dugout canoes, but the people up on the roofs and in the fetid second-story rooms just watch them go past.

"They'd take everything if I weren't here," Manuel Vázquez said Tuesday as he clung to a railing above his waterlogged Villahermosa home. "I'm resigned to staying here."

When the Grijalva River turned vicious over the weekend, when it slipped over its banks and ran wild across the state of Tabasco, its brown waters exposed a socioeconomic divide far deeper than its channel. The flood that President Felipe Calderón called "one of the worst natural disasters in Mexican history" swallowed a place called Gaviotas Sur. It has long been a place where the poor of Villahermosa hacked through flood-prone jungle to clear space for cinder-block shacks and corrugated metal lean-tos.

The rich and middle class of this city live north of the river. The rest live south of it, in Gaviotas Sur -- or as some here call it, "the Bronx." In much the same way as the ruined Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans forced the United States to face its class divide after Hurricane Katrina, Gaviotas Sur is exposing uncomfortable truths in this boggy Gulf of Mexico state.

"The message is that we are poorer than we thought," said Raúl Abreu Lastra, a native of Tabasco and founder of a Mexico City research group, Fundación Idea, which examines poverty and education. "We have thousands of people living down by the river who shouldn't be living there."

The perilous nature of life here crystallized last week. Torrential rains battered Tabasco, swelling the rivers that crisscross Mexico's most perpetually soggy state. By early Friday, the Grijalva, which runs fast and deep through downtown Villahermosa, and other rivers were cascading over their banks and hitting hardest in poor, low-lying areas such as Gaviotas Sur.

The homes of as many as 1 million people have been destroyed or heavily damaged in the days since by floodwaters that rose as high as 19 feet. Water levels have subsided in many areas. Still, Gov. Andrés Granier estimated Tuesday that the flooding has caused $4.7 billion in damage to homes, as well as banana fields and cattle ranches.

The death toll has been surprisingly low -- three reported killed and 14 to 16 missing and feared dead in a mudslide in the village of San Juan Grijalva, in Chiapas state, south of Villahermosa. But the widespread displacement and misery rival the worst of the natural disasters, including hurricanes, that Mexicans have seen over the years.

Even as downtown Villahermosa was drying out Tuesday, fast currents of water -- pushed by the strength of the nearby river -- were sloshing carcasses of chickens and cows through the squalid neighborhoods still drowning in 10 feet of water in Gaviotas Sur. It may be weeks before all the water is gone, local officials say, and years before the region recovers economically.

Thousands of people line up each day, some waiting until the wee hours, to get food and water in this city, which means "beautiful town" in Spanish. A massive relief effort is underway, but in the past few days, as some stranded residents have been spotted drinking polluted river water, there has been a growing chorus of complaints about distribution problems.

Tabasco is Mexico's fourth-poorest state, with 59 percent of the population below the poverty line, according to Mexico's National Center for Policy Evaluation and Social Development. But the river made the poverty less obvious, separating its day-to-day face from people living in better conditions on the other side.