Stunned by Quake, Mexican Town Fears It ‘Will Never Be the Same’
" said José Antonio, "is destroyed." Elisabeth Malkin reported from Jojutla,
and Azam Ahmed from Mexico City. that Everything that our father left us,
Their home was gone, reduced to crumbled bits of adobe
that now held a menagerie of odds and ends pulled from the wreckage after Tuesday’s earthquake, which leveled large parts of Jojutla, a town unaccustomed to earthquakes, and left at least 28 people dead.
At a school building that collapsed onto dozens of students in Mexico City, officials gave a final assessment of the toll, which was lower than initially announced: 19 dead children and six dead adults, with the faint hope
that a member of the custodial staff might still be alive under the debris.
Hilda Nava Batalla said that We have seen this on television but we never imagined it could happen to us,
Aid trucks have begun arriving from Mexico City, but the continued need in Jojutla is in some
ways a reflection of the disparity between the capital and the nation’s more rural areas.
Jojutla, with 60,000 residents in Morelos State, is near the epicenter of the earthquake and was among the hardest-hit places in all of Mexico.