ACAPULCO, Gro., November 11, 2023.- According to funeral homes in this port, there were at least 350 deaths due to the impact of Hurricane Otis, a figure that contradicts the official report of the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has minimized the number of victims to 48 deaths.
This was said by the director of the Quadratín Guerrero news agency, Ricardo Castillo Díaz, when offering his testimony as a person affected by the hurricane, during the José Cárdenas program in the Grupo Formula studio in Mexico City, hosted by Óscar Olguín.
“We have reported that in all the funeral homes in Acapulco, there must be at least 350 deaths of those who managed to collect the bodies of their relatives, their loved ones. Additionally, there are many people missing, so that figure (of López Obrador) of the dead does not correspond to reality either,” he indicated.
He pointed out that the federal government has not released an official list of the dead or missing with first and last names “as happens in every tragedy of this type, especially so that people can help search for these relatives; Well, well, we also don’t know all that and we are convinced that the official figure that the President of the Republic has released regarding the dead is very short for the magnitude of the tragedy.”
He stated that on the other hand, given the lack of medical care after the tragedy, “there are people who are dying, even I have a very close testimony of some friends, of a person who required medical attention, who could not have it in the hospital and unfortunately died.”
Previously, the journalist narrated his experience during the night of October 24, the day he lost everything in his house, from windows, doors, living room, mattresses, personal belongings and documents. He indicated that it was something unexpected since it was not raining that hard and suddenly the wind started like a kind of blender and stirred everything around.
“After two or even three hours that this did not stop, objects began to fall from the building where we were, we heard an intense rain of projectiles and the worst moment was when the building began to move, that was when I personally thought that we were not going to free her,” he recalled.
He said that all the news agency’s workers were also affected and that it took up to three days to contact everyone. “We didn’t know what was happening until we started looking for each other and walking long distances to find out about each other,” she explained.
He indicated that more than two weeks after the hurricane there is still no electricity or water and some have difficulty finding food in the port. He said that there is a lot of indignation at the decision of the federal government to decree the end of the emergency and considered that this is at its most critical moment due to the scarcity of food and the amount of garbage that exists in all the neighborhoods.
