For a few hours in the morning of September 19, 1985, the world believed that the capital of Mexico had disappeared.
The earthquake destroyed the city’s communications infrastructure, with impact in much of the country.
All telephony was immediately suspended in the metropolitan area, just like telegraphy and microwave service. In the neighboring states the long distance was inactive.
Neither embassies, neither international organizations nor the correspondents of foreign media could report to their respective venues what was really happening.
The earthquake also caused destruction in states of the Pacific coast and severely damaged roads, railways, ports and airports of the affected area. There were landslides at the main headquarters of the Ministry of Communications and Transportation.
The building of the Ministry of Communications and Transportation, after the earthquake of September 19, 1985. Photographer of The Scop Center and the earthquakes of Iván Salcido
The Mexican satellite Morelos I, which had barely been put in orbit in June of the same year, allowed state television to air.
The offices of several international press agencies were in an area in the center of the city strongly damaged, on the Paseo de la Reforma and its vicinity. The damage in buildings were also an obstacle to work.
For dozens of foreign media reporters there was no choice but to look for any possibility of transmission in the correspondible correspondent club, near Reforma.
The place was an old three -story house, well conditioned, with phones and a Telex room, which were then the windows to the world.
Telex was a point -to -point communications system through binary signals similar to telegraph. Each user had a terminal with a keyboard. The text that was transmitted appeared immediately in a roll of paper that advanced and could be read on a light screen.
But that morning also in the correspondent club the phones and Telex machines were unusable. It was a crisis on top of the other: the infinite and devastating reality that had to be reported and the null possibility of doing so.
They would be after 10 in the morning when the tumult of correspondents suddenly concentrated on a corner, in which one seemed to work only of the Telex.
The voice of a Yugoslav colleague who said the only thing at that time was imposed on the screams and pushed, that each one makes three attempts. And if the connection does not enter the third attempt, the next one passes. Without time or encouragement to discuss variants, they all complied with and the rehearsals began.
A connection worked finally. The lucky correspondent who achieved a link to Havana had to improvise his office right there, trying to remember, to write with some coherence, everything he had seen on a walking tour of the destroyed streets of the city.
As if it were a choral work, the colleagues looked out the text and shouted him, they almost ordered the correspondent to put what was missing: that if there are no figures, that the damage is incalculable, that there is no official version, that the collapse of the Hotel Regis, which the communications fell …
Little by little there were other attempts and, finally, the world was able to find out in thick strokes of what was happening in Mexico, Federal District, in one of the natural disasters that have been more deep in the country’s recent history.
In the absence of options to transmit from some nearby city, the Associated Press agency and the CBS television network were able to rent a private flight to Texas and from there send abroad, with more slack, broader stories of that terrible dawn.
But in all the previous hours, since the communications ceased, the earthquake was barely occurred at 7:19, in the world the version that the former Tenochtitlán had disappeared circulated.
The next day, September 20, 1985, communication improved. A long distance phone worked at the correspondent club and eventually some of the Telex terminals.
In the afternoon, the Undersecretary of the Interior went to the club, Fernando Pérez Correa, to offer the official part until that moment: the data, the figures, the foreign aid, the airports, the message of the government …
They passed 7 at night and Pérez Correa answered questions, when the wooden ladder of the old house on Pánuco Street began to creak and the lamps and the floor moved. A blackout came and the cars of a neighboring parking lot crashed with each other.
A second earthquake caused the conference room, full of correspondents, suddenly to be empty. Everyone went into stumbling to the street, to darkness and unease.
Minutes later, many made the row again before the only phone in the club that still worked.
