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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Oct. 23, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Editorial: Capitalist hurricane in Acapulco

Human error? God’s will? Natural disaster? Take your pick. It’s interesting how the rich and their representatives always find someone or something else to blame when a bunch of poor people die. It wasn’t Union Carbide’s fault, for example, that its massive chemical leak killed 2,000 people in Bhopal, India, in 1984. When a ferry capsized and almost 500 people drowned in Haiti last month, it wasn’t the responsibility of the boat company owner, who lives in Miami—and it certainly wasn’t the fault of the U.S.-based companies that have so exploited Haiti that the roads are impassable because the country has no money to maintain the infrastructure.

By the same capitalist logic, there’s no one to blame for the deaths of at least 120 people in Acapulco, Mexico, on Oct. 9. It was a hurricane, after all. An act of nature. These things happen. Don’t blame us.

That’s the line government officials and rich resort owners are taking in the wake of Hurricane Pauline. But the poor of Acapulco aren’t buying it. Neither should anyone else.

Does nature prefer the rich? Is that why the hurricane barely touched the glitzy resort hotels? Of course not. The fact is, all the hurricane’s victims lived in squatters’ camps and shantytowns, in flimsy dwellings easily swept away by the hurricane’s winds.

Most of those dwellings had been erected in a dry riverbed, because that’s the only place unemployed and impoverished workers and their families could afford to live. They paid absentee landlords $4 per square yard for the right to erect tarpaper shacks. With the hurricane, the riverbed quickly filled and overflowed, pouring mud through the squatters’ camp and sweeping away everything and everyone in its path.

In contrast, the resorts, most of them owned by multimillion-dollar U.S. chains, are sturdy and safe. For well-heeled tourists, Hurricane Pauline’s worst effect was that they had to stay inside for the day.

But this isn’t only a tale of unsafe housing. The poor could have been warned. The resorts could have provided buses and personnel to evacuate them. The hotel companies could have paid to build decent housing for the poor after the hurricane, and housed them while the new homes were being built. Fat chance.

The authorities, of course, knew the hurricane was coming. They’d known for days. They broadcast warnings on television. But there were no televisions in the shantytown. Told that many Tijuana residents blame his government for failing to rescue their loved ones, President Ernesto Zedillo said, "They are ignorant."

Ignorance didn’t kill the hurricane’s victims. Capitalism—which impoverished them while enriching the U.S. hotel chains that virtually own Acapulco—killed them.

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