There are times when the Rio Grande is little more than a trickle running through a concrete ditch separating Mexico and the US.
This week was not one of them.
The remnants of Hurricane Alex unleashed torrents of rain over northeastern Mexico, in what Mexican President Felipe Calderon called the worst storm “in recent memory” in the region. The rain broke records in some areas and floodwaters poured into rivers, inundating towns and shutting down border bridges.
The storm killed at least 30 people, according to local newspaper reports. Among the dead was Jose Manuel Maldonado, the mayor of Piedras Negras, across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas. He and four other people died when their light plane crashed on Wednesday as they were surveying the flood zone.
Across the region, people scrambled to safety on their rooftops, packed up their belongings ahead of advancing floodwaters and piled into shelters. Helicopters rescued people who had waited too long to evacuate, and soldiers piled sandbags on one of the international bridges between Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and Laredo, Texas, as rising floodwaters lapped at the edge.
Jesus Luebano, the secretary of the Mexican section of the International Boundary and Water Commission, which oversees the Rio Grande river basin, said that the region had received more rainfall in recent days than during Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, a storm people still talk about.
“We are talking about something truly extraordinary,” he said.
Commerce between Mexico and the US was hampered by the storm. Collapsed bridges shut down the highway between Monterrey, Mexico’s industrial capital, and the main border crossing at Nuevo Laredo on Friday. The governor of Tamaulipas State, which contains Nuevo Laredo, said it could take three to four days to reopen the road, a major interruption.
Parts of the seven-month-old highway between Monterrey and the auto manufacturing city of Saltillo were also closed by mudslides. On Thursday, the rising Rio Grande forced officials to shut two of the border crossings between Nuevo Laredo and Laredo, backing up trucks for kilometers.
More rain in northeastern Mexico was expected this weekend from a tropical depression.
In Monterrey, rains at the beginning of the month brought the city to a standstill. In a matter of days, the city had received more rain than it typically would receive over the whole year.
Along the Rio Grande, the waters rose to their highest levels in decades. The flow into the Amistad dam, near Ciudad Acuna in Coahuila State and Del Rio, Texas, was the highest since 1974, Luebano said.
A waterlogged wing of the century-old town hall in Linares, in Nuevo Leon, collapsed in seconds.
Los Salteadores de Linares, a Mexican norteno country music group, wrote a “corrido” ballad to Hurricane Alex ending with a warning: “Listen well, authorities,” the final verse began. “Don’t get your shoes all muddy for publicity photos. Get to work.”
FORUM: The Solomon Islands’ move to bar Taiwan, the US and others from the Pacific Islands Forum has sparked criticism that Beijing’s influence was behind the decision Tuvaluan Prime Minister Feletei Teo said his country might pull out of the region’s top political meeting next month, after host nation Solomon Islands moved to block all external partners — including China, the US and Taiwan — from attending. The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) leaders’ meeting is to be held in Honiara in September. On Thursday last week, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele told parliament that no dialogue partners would be invited to the annual gathering. Countries outside the Pacific, known as “dialogue partners,” have attended the forum since 1989, to work with Pacific leaders and contribute to discussions around
END OF AN ERA: The vote brings the curtain down on 20 years of socialist rule, which began in 2005 when Evo Morales, an indigenous coca farmer, was elected president A center-right senator and a right-wing former president are to advance to a run-off for Bolivia’s presidency after the first round of elections on Sunday, marking the end of two decades of leftist rule, preliminary official results showed. Bolivian Senator Rodrigo Paz was the surprise front-runner, with 32.15 percent of the vote cast in an election dominated by a deep economic crisis, results published by the electoral commission showed. He was followed by former Bolivian president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga in second with 26.87 percent, according to results based on 92 percent of votes cast. Millionaire businessman Samuel Doria Medina, who had been tipped
Outside Havana, a combine belonging to a private Vietnamese company is harvesting rice, directly farming Cuban land — in a first — to help address acute food shortages in the country. The Cuban government has granted Agri VAM, a subsidiary of Vietnam’s Fujinuco Group, 1,000 hectares of arable land in Los Palacios, 118km west of the capital. Vietnam has advised Cuba on rice cultivation in the past, but this is the first time a private firm has done the farming itself. The government approved the move after a 52 percent plunge in overall agricultural production between 2018 and 2023, according to data
ELECTION DISTRACTION? When attention shifted away from the fight against the militants to politics, losses and setbacks in the battlefield increased, an analyst said Recent clashes in Somalia’s semi-autonomous Jubaland region are alarming experts, exposing cracks in the country’s federal system and creating an opening for militant group al-Shabaab to gain ground. Following years of conflict, Somalia is a loose federation of five semi-autonomous member states — Puntland, Jubaland, Galmudug, Hirshabelle and South West — that maintain often fractious relations with the central government in the capital, Mogadishu. However, ahead of elections next year, Somalia has sought to assert control over its member states, which security analysts said has created gaps for al-Shabaab infiltration. Last week, two Somalian soldiers were killed in clashes between pro-government forces and