1985: The Earthquake That Taught Mexico City to Save Itself

At 7:18 in the morning on September 19, 1985, the Nuevo León tower at the Nonoalco-Tlatelolco housing complex, the same modernist showcase where soldiers had opened fire on student protesters seventeen years earlier, folded in on itself in under a minute. Roughly 500 of its 1,200 residents died. Tenants had spent months warning officials that the building was leaning well past what city safety codes allowed. Nobody had fixed it.

The government that stayed home

The tower’s collapse was one of hundreds across the city that morning, after a magnitude-8.0 earthquake struck roughly 200 miles away off the coast of Michoacán. The death toll is still disputed: the number most often cited is around 10,000, though credible estimates run as high as 40,000. President Miguel de la Madrid’s government response, in the days that mattered most, amounted to denial. He initially turned down offers of international aid and played down the scale of the damage, even as entire blocks of the capital lay in rubble.

The moles

Ordinary residents didn’t wait for permission. Within hours, volunteers, many of them students and young professionals with no training or equipment, were digging through collapsed buildings with their hands, tunneling into the wreckage after survivors. The press started calling them Los Topos, the moles, for the way they burrowed into the rubble. One brigade that organized in Tlatelolco, the Brigada de Rescate Topos Tlatelolco, still exists today and has deployed to earthquakes around the world since. What the government couldn’t or wouldn’t do, the city did for itself, and it never quite let go of the habit.

What that confidence built

The organizing didn’t stop once the rubble was cleared. For seven decades, the president had simply appointed Mexico City’s mayor, always a loyalist from the ruling PRI party, with no election involved. The civic confidence that came out of 1985 is widely credited by historians with helping drive the political pressure that ended that arrangement: in 1997, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas became the capital’s first elected mayor, closing out PRI’s unbroken hold on the city’s government. Another direct legacy of 1985 sits overhead: the city’s seismic alarm system, developed in the years right after the quake, went live in 1991 and became, in 1993, the first system in the world to publicly broadcast earthquake warnings to an entire city. Roma and Condesa, two of the neighborhoods hit hardest by the quake, emptied out and stayed cheap for a decade afterward, drawing in the artists and young residents who eventually turned them into two of the city’s trendiest, most expensive addresses.

The same date, thirty-two years later

On September 19, 2017, just hours after that year’s citywide earthquake drill, held annually to mark the 1985 anniversary, a real magnitude-7.1 earthquake struck. Some residents assumed the alarm was the drill running long. It killed 370 people; the single deadliest loss was at the Enrique Rébsamen school in the south of the city, where 19 children and 7 adults died after part of the building came down. Officials had reportedly ignored complaints about unauthorized construction there too. But the overall toll was a fraction of 1985’s, thanks in part to building codes tightened after that earlier quake, and the volunteers who converged on collapse sites within the hour, organizing largely over social media, were recognizably the descendants of the Topos. So was Frida, a Mexican Navy search-and-rescue Labrador who spent that week sniffing through the wreckage in protective goggles and rubber boots and became the earthquake’s most photographed symbol. By the time she retired in 2019, she’d worked 53 disaster sites across Mexico, Haiti, Ecuador, and Guatemala, credited with finding more than 50 people, twelve of them still alive. The alarm the city built in 1985’s aftermath still sounds every year on the anniversary, and, as it turned out that day, sometimes for real. For what to do when it does, see what to do in an earthquake in Mexico City.

Sources: Historical accounts of the September 19, 1985 earthquake, including reporting on the Nuevo León building collapse and the Los Topos rescue brigades; accounts of Mexico City’s 1997 mayoral election and the end of presidentially appointed governance; historical documentation of the SASMEX seismic alert system’s development; contemporary reporting on the September 19, 2017 earthquake and the Enrique Rébsamen school collapse; contemporary reporting on Frida, the Mexican Navy’s search-and-rescue dog, and her career and retirement.