Morelia bomb victim speaks, blood still on the streets

Rafael Bucio was waiting for his mother on the corner of the streets Madero and Quintana Roo in Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico Monday night as the city reveled in its Independence Day celebrations.

Behind him, his wife Gloria Alvarez stood in the street with their three-month old child in her arms and their seven-year old daughter Jannyfer nearby. The three of them watched the fireworks going off, looking up into the cool night sky, whilst their father waited for their grandmother.

They didn’t know that their lives were about to change forever.

“Lots of ambulances and patrol cars started to pass by going to the center – to the cathedral,” explained Bucio Wednesday afternoon from a hospital bed, broken bones in his arm and leg held together by pins. Blood seeped through the bandages onto the white cotton sheet covering the bed.

He was moving closer to his wife, away from the street corner, when he heard a thump.

“There was a patrol car parked in the street blocking the cars – a transport patrol – and I heard something hit the patrol car. So I turned round to see and something rolled…when it stopped I realized that it was a grenade.

It went off, catapulting Bucio back two meters and onto the ground.

When he came to, he could see his wife unconscious on the street in front of him, and Jannyfer on her knees, her face covered in blood, screaming for him to help her.

“I saw my wife and I thought that she was already dead but no – she was still alive. She died here, in the emergency room.”

Gloria Alvarez was one of seven lives that were claimed by the two explosions in the city – evidence of which was still obvious to my colleague and I when we arrived there Wednesday to report on the bombs’ aftermath.

The main plaza, where the first bomb had exploded, was sealed off to the public. Heavily armed soldiers guarded the perimeter. Beyond them, men in white boiler suits picked their way around shoes, socks and more unrecognizable debris and mess left by the grenade blast that went off when Governor Leonel Godoy gave the traditional cry of independence “Viva Mexico!” on Monday evening.

The majority of people on the plaza that night didn’t even realize that there had been an explosion – the noise of music and fireworks hid the bang that sent projectiles flying into the feet and legs of people crowded.

Eerily, television pictures from that night show how the music kept playing and the fireworks kept firing whilst paramedics picked their way around the dead and injured just a few meters away from revelers.

Bucio, who was hit by the second explosion a few blocks away, didn’t know that the first grenade had gone off minutes before. He said the fireworks got confused with the bangs from the bombs.

On Wednesday, the street corner where his wife had been fatally wounded and he seriously injured had been cordoned off by plastic tape. There was what looked like old, red tar on the street, starting about a meter out from the kerb. It was dried blood – when it was fresh it had been spilled in the road and then run down the little hill towards the gutter.

On the pavement were more bloodstains. In one of the small patches of sticky, red gunk was a long lock of dark, curly hair – one end stuck hard in the red glue and the other moving around in the wind.

Bucio thinks that the person who threw the second grenade was aiming for the police, but that it bounced off the patrol car and into the crowd. Two people died from that blast – Bucio’s wife and another person, as yet unidentified, who fell down next to her.

In the wall of the curtain shop in front of which the grenade went off, shrapnel marks were visible in the stone – where pieces of the grenade had flown off and dug in.

Who is responsible for the attack? The favourite culprit is Mexico’s big bag narcotraffickers, who you can’t have helped but notice are the focus of a crackdown by President Felipe Calderon who has dispatched 40,000 soldiers and 5,00 federal police to try to secure vast swathes of the country.

But setting off two bombs in a public place seems an odd thing to do for illicit networks that rely on the cooperative silence of significant parts of the civilian population to survive. It would seem they are shooting themselves in the foot by targeting innocent civilians – no matter how desperate they are to deal a heavy blow to Calderon, who is from the state of Michoacan – one of Mexico’s most drug-ridden.

The drug-cartels have access to cash and weaponry that could create an attack far more sophisticated than a simple grenade. The whole set-up from Monday night – during which a man dressed in black moved through the crowd saying “Perdoname, perdoname (forgive me, forgive me),” before throwing the first grenade – seems far too amateur and unprofessional.

Then again – maybe that could be part of their strategy, making the attack look like a fudged, low-budget affair.

It could just have been a couple of whackos, or perhaps even a whole new network in Mexico that we yet know nothing about.

Sadly, as is so often the case in this country, all one can really do is speculate. At the time of writing, the authorities had made three arrests in connection with Monday’s bombing.

Due to the pressure that Calderon is under to provide a head for the attacks – pressure which builds each day that his administration proves itself so useless in improving the level of security in the country posed not only by the drug cartels but soaring crime and kidnapping levels – the reliability of these arrests is highly dubious.