CHRONICLE OF A COUNTRY ON FIRE! APOCALYPTIC WEEKEND IN MEXICO: BETWEEN ROAD HELL, THE FURY OF NATURE AND THE CIRCUS OF VANITY

SUBTITLE: Death traveled by trailer and bus, leaving a trail of blood and national mourning that overshadows any celebration. While the country mourns its innocents and searches for its missing among the earth and twisted irons, the other side of the coin shows the frivolity of social networks, the extreme misery and the surreal contrasts that only our land can offer. A brutal 72-hour count that has left us with a broken soul.

BY: THE BLACK CAT /THE NATIONAL ALARM EDITORIAL TEAM

MEXICO CITY.— If the devil had a branch on earth, this weekend he decided to open it on the roads and towns of our beautiful and wounded Mexico. There are not enough words in the dictionary of tragedy to describe the whirlwind of pain, fire and tears that has plagued the nation in recent hours. We wake up with a “NATIONAL SADNESS” that penetrates to the bones, reflected in the faces of our old people who see how the country is falling apart in their hands. This is the red chronicle of a weekend that we would like to erase from memory, but that destiny has taken care of tattooing us with blood.

HELL HAS A POSTAL CODE: THE ROAD OF DEATH

The epicenter of the horror occurred in the concrete arteries that connect the country. What looked like a Friday of celebration and a Saturday of rest, became a coven of twisted iron. Recklessness and speeding took their toll. In a mountain stretch, the scene was Dantesque: heavy cargo units and private vehicles fell into the void like broken toys in a ravine, leaving a trail of destruction that is difficult to describe.

But the most brutal blow, the one that took us all off the air, occurred on the federal highway. A passenger bus, full of families, students and workers who just wanted to get home, came face to face with the devil himself. A fuel pipe, that wheeled time bomb, collided brutally. The result was instant hell. The images of the units engulfed in gigantic flames, spitting black smoke into the sky while the lives inside were consumed, are the crudest sight of this day.

The emergency services could not cope. At another point, a white car was left with its tires facing the sky, overturned in a ditch, while the “tira” cordoned off the area and the bodies, silent witnesses of the deadly speed, were covered with white sheets or improvised tarps on the hot asphalt. The night brought no respite; The driver of a red cargo truck, with the lost gaze of someone who knows that he has just ruined his life and that of many others, was booked after being involved in another accident in the middle of a bar area, where the party ended in sirens and crying. Even a white pipe of water or milk ended up overturned on the side of the road, adding to the chaos.

THE FACES OF GOODBYE: ANGELS AND WARRIORS WHO WILL NOT RETURN

The damage count is not numbers, it is names, it is canceled futures. Mourning has settled in hundreds of homes. We mourn the young promise of football, that girl with an easy smile and tricolor uniform who will no longer score goals on earthly fields. We say goodbye with honors to that man with a strong look, perhaps a soldier or a retired police officer, who greeted life with respect until the last moment. We remember the man with glasses, whose serious look is now a memory framed in a black bow.

The pain is most acute when the victims are the most innocent. Children who were just beginning to live and who are now remembered with black bows and photographs that break our souls. Desperation has the face of that mother who, clinging to a microphone, begs for information, showing a last WhatsApp audio message of just 3 seconds, a thread of hope to which she clings tooth and nail while searching for her little one among the photos of the missing. And we do not forget the child’s deep look at the “SE BUSCA” poster, whose absence is a hole in the heart of society. The search brigades comb mountains and rivers, hoping to find a little girl, whose mourning bun already portends the worst.

NATURE AND ABSURDITY ALSO ATTACK

As if man’s hand were not enough, nature also showed its fangs. Meteorologists look with terror at satellite maps that show a monstrous hurricane, a perfect eye of destruction that threatens to make landfall and add more misfortune to what we already have. The earth itself seems to protest, opening into gigantic cracks that split entire communities, swallowing houses and roads. Or the sinkhole left by a car hanging from a crane as a macabre trophy of urban fragility.

And in the midst of chaos, the unusual. Hospitals receive cases that defy medical logic: an intubated patient, fighting for every breath of air in a hospital bed, a “nobody” labeled “FORGOTTEN IDENTITIES”. Meanwhile, the doctors look in disbelief at the x-ray of another subject who, in an act of madness or desperation, swallowed an entire chain, iron for iron, which they had to remove from his throat. Danger lurks even in the sleep of the little ones, where giant and poisonous insects such as centipedes walk near their cribs in the most humble houses.

THE GREAT MEXICAN CONTRAST: VANITY, MISERY AND SURREALISM

But this country would not be Mexico without its brutal contrasts, those that give you a slap in the face of reality. While the country is bleeding, the circus of vanity on social networks does not stop. There we have the “influencer” on duty, showing off dangerous curves in a pink outfit in front of the mirror, inviting us to watch “plus kinky videos” while the world burns outside.

The national debate is diverted towards frivolity: is it right for a mother to leave her child at school in tight sports leggings and tops, like the woman caught on her back at the school gate?. Or how about the teacher who distracts the students with her fitted dresses and necklines in the classroom? And the moms who seem to go on a runway instead of a school kermes, in short dresses and gravity-defying heels?. Debates from “barrio fino” while real tragedy breathes down our necks.

The other side of the coin is the one that really hurts. The misery that has no Instagram filter. The indigenous mother who carries her two small children in a shawl, with the lost gaze of someone who doesn’t know if she will eat today. The poor woman sitting on a metal curtain step, hugging her baby, invisible to the rest of the world. The boy, who should be playing, but who carries a vegetable bag bigger than him to carry a few pesos home, with his Spider-Man backpack in tow, in a country where childhood is a luxury.

And to close the surreal picture of our magical Mexico, the images that leave you with a square eye. The man who sleeps the monkey, or perhaps his entire life, stuck inside a blue plastic drum on a public road. The young “darks” who found her bed in an old armchair lying in a clandestine garbage dump, sleeping peacefully in the trash. The subject who lies lying on the ground, with a tribal tattoo on his arm, a victim of violence or alcohol, forgotten by everyone. Or the grandfather with his prosthesis and cane, lying on the floor, another forgotten identity.

Without forgetting the bizarre: a pig on a ranch that seems to have taken steroids, with muscles worthy of a bodybuilder that scare the bravest, or the giant dog, a brindle mastiff, who decides that the best place to sit is on top of his owner, crushing her with his doggy love.

This is how this weekend ends black, red and all the colors of pain and absurdity. A Mexico that wakes up on Monday with a hangover of tragedy, counting its dead, searching for its missing people in the mountains and in the rivers, and wondering if one day the red note will no longer be our daily bread. In the meantime, all we have to do is cross ourselves and move on.