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Desperation hits Cancun
25/10/2005 19:27 - (SA)
Cancun - Hurricane Wilma is long gone, but those the left stranded on Mexico's Caribbean coast are tired, fed-up and ready to go home after spending the better part of a week in foul-smelling shelters, sometimes with little food and water.
President Vicente Fox acknowledged that getting the tourists out - and then getting them back in again by the start of high season in December - was one of Mexico's highest national priorities, given that Cancun is one of the nation's biggest sources of cash income.
"They should bring down transports. The conditions are getting worse, and people are going to start getting sick," said Tom Dinonno, 48, of Levittown, New York, as his wife Karen struggled to make a credit-card call from a Cancun pay phone.
Desperation was common across the flooded, looted Cancun. A curfew was declared on Monday night, and police cars drove through the city, their lights flashing, barking orders over their loudspeakers for people to return to their homes.
"People are desperate. They are nervous," Fox said.
He said the country's first priority was to get enough food and water to the coast, and he dispatched Mexican military ships, planes and trucks to bring supplies. He said the second priority was to get tourists home.
"The tourists want to get out, they want to go home already," he said
Only six people were known dead in Mexico, Fox said, adding to the 13 who died earlier as Wilma hit Jamaica and Haiti. At least six deaths were blamed on the hurricane in Florida, bringing the toll from the storm's overall toll to 25.
In Belize, south of Mexico, police said they found three missing divers alive - and the body of a fourth - from a dive boat that disappeared over the weekend. It was unclear whether that mishap was caused by the storm or mechanical problems aboard the boat.
On Monday, buses began ferrying hundreds of tourists out of Cancun by highway to the city of Merida, about 280km to the west, where they may be able to wrangle homebound flights.
"I feel the Mexican government is helping here to an extent, doing the best they can," said Kevin Riley, town finance administrator for Paw Paw, Michigan. "But the US has done nothing. Where is our government? They are only preparing for Florida. They forgot about us."
Many of Cancun's own 500 000 residents had lost nearly everything in flooded or destroyed homes.
"It is going to take us a couple of months to have 80, 90% of the tourism capacity of Cancun working," President Vicente Fox said televised interview with the Televisa network as he stood before cars sloshing through still-flooded streets lined with downed power lines.
"We're approaching the full tourist season. So speed is fundamental," he added.
- AP
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