Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador slammed his critics in the wake of Hurricane Otis, which tore through Mexico’s Pacific coast last week as a Category 5 storm.
Obrador took aim at those who he said were exaggerating the destruction caused by the hurricane and suggested they were providing misleading information. The storm last week left more than three dozen people dead so far, destroyed houses and other structures and flooded the cities of Acapulco and Guerrero.
“They circle like vultures. They don’t care about people’s pain, they want to hurt us, for there to have been lots of deaths,” he said Saturday in a video message posted to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Otis took Mexico and forecasters by surprise after it developed into a Category 5 storm Tuesday night into Wednesday of last week with 165 mph winds. It was initially forecasted to make landfall as a tropical storm, but instead became the strongest landfall of any east Pacific hurricane, The Associated Press reported.
Obrador later suggested that some critics had given misleading information about the death toll in his 24-minute video message, saying that Security Minister Rosa Icela Rodríguez provided an updated death toll “without lying.”
Rodriguez said that 39 people have been confirmed dead as of Saturday, noting that the likely cause of death was “suffocation by submersion.” This death toll will likely continue to rise over the next couple of days, as first responders continue to search the waters for victims and survivors.
Since the storm took many by surprise, many people rode out in boats in what was expected to be a tropical storm. The government reported Saturday that at least 10 people were considered missing.