NARCO-MAR. Chapter 63. The Earthquake and the Possessed

The earthquake was the most frightening event that the southern coast of La Esperanza and the north of El Maní experienced. The psychological effect was more severe than the physical effect. Tall buildings were collapsing or cracking and these buildings had become the symbol of economic power. The wood and zinc hovels of the poor were less spoiled than the opulent mansions, the luxurious cement villas of the millionaires, who had them for vacationing or living in a private oceanfront paradise.

More than 700 dead people were counted, but schools, colleges, hospitals, roads and businesses collapsed.

The president of the country who was traveling immediately arrived at the disaster area.

Unlike other earthquakes in the Pacific, it originated a few kilometers from Pedernales, but destroyed buildings along 1000 km of the coast of Ecuador.

These earthquakes, frequent in the South American Pacific, have to do with the collision of the tectonic plates, in which the Pacific plate and the South American or Nazca Plate have collided for millennia and gave rise to the Andes, and have been so severe that at first the Amazon River emptied into the Pacific, but these earthquakes gave rise to the enormous mountains of the South American Andes. They have an average altitude over thousands of kilometers of more than 3000 meters above sea level, here are located the two highest capitals in the world, La Paz in Bolivia and Quito in Ecuador.

In the manga, a few months before the earthquake, there was a collective psychosis among the young women of the school, the majority of which were black. Dr. Máxima, who was working in Trinidad at the time, went with other doctors in the area to attend to this unusual phenomenon, where more than a hundred girls went into delusions and announced that a great natural disaster was approaching.

The doctors were convinced that it was a psychological problem. typical of black culture, who were faithful practitioners of the Macumba, a religion brought from Africa by slaves. that spread through South America. while Budu and Santeria spread throughout the Caribbean.

In the Macumba, there were rites that created a state of catharsis, in which through dancing, alcohol, drum music and singing, the followers went into a trance and those girls could see a parallel world, where the souls of the living and the dead they communicate, where the present, the past and the future coexist in a different time - space.

"It is a collective psychosis, where magic takes over the minds of the girls," said the doctor who wrote the report for the Ministry of Education and Health.

"What caught my attention," said Dr. Máxima, "is how girls get infected so quickly, but not men, and that they foresee a great natural disaster."

-We are only psychologists, and doctors, we are not parapsychologists- said the educational psychologist of the College- I don't know anything about that.

- My father who was a doctor in the town of El Salado, which is a neighbor- said Máxima- told me that there were people who with music and unbridled dancing entered a state of convulsion and loss of consciousness, which is called Baile de San Vito, or circa, because since colonial times, the Fiesta de San Vitorio, a saint that I neither know nor have seen, blacks used to perform this ceremony. There, these collective psychoses occurred, which, like what happens with girls, enter a convulsive, uncontrollable state. Even when there are bacterial infections that affect the brain, or when there is anoxia due to lack of oxygen in the brain, what in medicinal terms we call neurovegetative dystonia can occur, in which each eye moves in different directions, or each muscle cramps and cramps. moves on its own, without apparent connection with the other muscles, this in medicine we also call the Dance of San Vito or kernicterus

"The amazing thing about all this," said one of the black teachers, who apparently knew this very well, "is that the girls say that a terrible earthquake is coming." I really don't know what world we live in.

"For my part," said the doctor who wrote the report, "I believe that what is dealing with a collective psychosis, nothing more."

Máxima remembered those events as she walked through the streets of Las Mangas, where the destruction was total, the military built a refugee camp, with numerous blue tents donated by China. In that place as well as the front on the Island of San Miguel, two camps were built, there were more than 3000 people who now lived next to each other, ate in collective dining rooms, under tents, had common toilets and showers, nets metal that separated them from the outside world, guarded by the military, to avoid thieves, everyone came and went signing a register.