Relatives of the victims of the explosion in Mexico deal with despair

In the place of the event, in one of the entrances to the town of Tlahuelilpan, in the central state of Hidalgo, a faint smell of gasoline seeps into the memories in an area destroyed by fire, with charred shoes, shirts stained with blood or even human skin on the earth.

In the middle of this desolate scenario, the authorities try to remove the remaining bodies.

While waiting, family members have two options: look inert how Army and Federal Police personnel dig into a gigantic ditch or go from hospital to hospital to see if, fortunately, one of their loved ones is alive.

"They tell us in a hospital, we go to that, they tell us in another and we go to that, and they do not bring us hospital from hospital and the information does not flow correctly", tells Efe Silvia Trejo, a woman who hopes to find her nephew and that he has not slept for almost 24 hours.

To move from one center to another, according to Silvia and others present, the authorities do not offer transportation, so they must mobilize by their own means.

It is usually a neighbor of the municipality of Tlahuelilpan or another relative who offers to take them, since "there are families that do not have means of transport".

Those who have already gone to the hospital, all they have left is to wait, although "the information does not flow correctly".

For his part, Efrén Hidalgo, a man who is waiting to find the body of one of his children, tells Efe that this morning he was taken by a friend to the Public Ministry of Mixquiahuala to fill out the corresponding forms and to take "proof of DNA to identify the corpse ".

While they wait, people from the municipality offer food and water to make the wait a little lighter.

Also staff of the National Commission of Human Rights (CNDH) is in place taking data to those present with the purpose of, if they find any of their relatives in a hospital, notify them.

"I hope he is alive in a hospital," says Silvia, who admits to being "desperate for not having news."

What happened last night he remembers clearly, with the image of his nephew running for fuel after it left one of the fuel pipelines of the state company, Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), minutes before the explosion .

It also recalls the time when the flames arrived and people broke into running almost naked through the grass with their bodies burning.

This is the worst image the woman remembers, along with that of the burned bodies and the smell of burnt flesh.

"It saddened me how people ran without clothes with their bodies burned, it was impressive to see that," she acknowledges.

Since the outbreak of this Friday and add at least 67 dead while and 75 injured.

The explosion occurs in the middle of the pulse that the new government decided to throw into the indiscriminate theft of fuel that has caused economic losses in the country for years.

According to official sources, in 2018 the losses reached 65,000 million pesos (about 3,400 million dollars).

This frontal combat to the problem has caused shortage of gasoline in the country as a result of which the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, changed the method of transportation of fuel, closing pipelines and moving the hydrocarbon with tankers.

This has caused shortages of gasoline since the beginning of the year in ten states of the country, among which is Hidalgo.

Those responsible for stealing and illegally selling the fuel from the pipelines are the so-called huachicoleros.

Both Silvia and the young Alfredo Guillermo Sierra denied to Efe that their relatives were dedicated to that, arguing that they were in the scene of obtaining gasoline due to the need caused by the shortage that the state has lived in recent days with the closed stations.

Even so, they recognize that it is funny to see how people associate their loved ones with these activities, a thought that adheres to the already hostile and desperate environment with which family members will have to live at least a few hours longer.