A bus veers off a highway in Nayarit, Mexico, killing eleven people. Fletcher and Octavio use this moment to explore why the roads along Mexico's Pacific coast are so dangerous, and how climate change is making everything worse.
Un autobús cae por una carretera en Nayarit, México, y mata a once personas. Fletcher y Octavio usan este momento para explorar por qué las carreteras del Pacífico mexicano son tan peligrosas y cómo el cambio climático lo está haciendo peor.
6 essential B1-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| infraestructura | infrastructure | La infraestructura de la región sufrió mucho daño después del huracán. |
| deslizamiento de tierra | landslide | Las lluvias intensas causaron un deslizamiento de tierra en la montaña. |
| adaptación | adaptation | La adaptación al cambio climático requiere mucho dinero y tiempo. |
| temporada de huracanes | hurricane season | La temporada de huracanes en el Pacífico mexicano dura varios meses. |
| empezar desde cero | to start from scratch / to start from zero | Después del incendio, la familia tuvo que empezar desde cero. |
| erosionar | to erode | El agua del río erosionó el terreno cerca de la carretera. |
There's a road in western Mexico I keep coming back to in my head this week.
A highway in Nayarit state, Pacific coast, and a bus full of passengers that went off the edge and killed eleven people.
That's the news item.
But the news item is almost the least interesting part of this story.
Sí, once muertos y treinta y un heridos.
Yes, eleven dead and thirty-one injured.
Es una tragedia terrible.
It's a terrible tragedy.
Pero cuando ves este tipo de accidente en México, especialmente en la costa del Pacífico, tienes que preguntarte: ¿por qué pasa esto tan frecuentemente en esa región?
But when you see this kind of accident in Mexico, especially on the Pacific coast, you have to ask: why does this happen so often in that region?
And that question is exactly where I want to start.
Because Nayarit isn't random.
It's one of the states along that Pacific corridor, Sinaloa, Nayarit, Jalisco, where the geography is dramatic and the roads are trying to keep up with mountains that don't cooperate.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
Nayarit es un estado con montañas, valles y una costa larga.
Nayarit is a state with mountains, valleys, and a long coastline.
Las carreteras tienen que subir y bajar mucho.
The roads have to go up and down a great deal.
Y cuando llueve mucho, como pasa más y más ahora con el cambio climático, las carreteras se dañan muy rápido.
And when it rains heavily, as happens more and more now with climate change, the roads deteriorate very quickly.
Let's unpack that climate piece, because I think people hear 'climate change and roads' and assume it's abstract.
It isn't.
Talk me through what's actually happening to precipitation patterns on Mexico's Pacific coast.
Mira, el Pacífico mexicano recibió siempre lluvias fuertes en verano y otoño.
Look, Mexico's Pacific coast always received heavy rains in summer and autumn.
Pero en los últimos años, las lluvias son más intensas y más cortas.
But in recent years, the rains are more intense and shorter.
No es que llueva más días, sino que cuando llueve, llueve muchísimo en pocas horas.
It's not that it rains more days, but when it does rain, it rains enormously in just a few hours.
Eso es muy destructivo para las carreteras.
That is very destructive for roads.
Flash flooding, basically.
I've seen that in other parts of Latin America.
A road looks fine in the morning and by the afternoon there are chunks of it sitting in a ravine.
The pavement doesn't have time to absorb and drain properly.
Sí, y además, cuando el terreno está muy seco antes de la lluvia, no absorbe el agua.
Yes, and on top of that, when the ground is very dry before the rain, it doesn't absorb the water.
El agua corre por la superficie y erosiona todo.
The water runs along the surface and erodes everything.
Esto pasa mucho en el oeste de México porque los meses antes de la temporada de lluvias son muy secos.
This happens a lot in western Mexico because the months before rainy season are very dry.
That cycle, extreme dry then extreme wet, it's the fingerprint of a warming climate on tropical and subtropical regions.
Meteorologists call it precipitation intensification.
The same total annual rainfall, but compressed into fewer, more violent events.
Y los huracanes también son un problema enorme.
And hurricanes are also an enormous problem.
El Pacífico mexicano tiene muchos huracanes cada año.
The Mexican Pacific has many hurricanes every year.
Nayarit, Sinaloa, Jalisco, todos estos estados reciben huracanes fuertes.
Nayarit, Sinaloa, Jalisco, all these states receive powerful hurricanes.
Después de un huracán, las carreteras quedan destruidas.
After a hurricane, the roads are destroyed.
A veces tardan meses en repararse.
Sometimes it takes months to repair them.
And those roads don't always get fully repaired before the next season hits.
That's the trap, isn't it.
The road is patched, not rebuilt, and then the next season of rain finds every weakness in that patch.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y hay otro problema: el presupuesto.
And there's another problem: the budget.
En México, los estados más ricos tienen carreteras mejores.
In Mexico, the richer states have better roads.
Nayarit no es un estado muy rico.
Nayarit is not a very rich state.
El gobierno federal da dinero para las carreteras, pero no siempre es suficiente para reparar todos los daños después de cada temporada de huracanes.
The federal government gives money for roads, but it isn't always enough to repair all the damage after each hurricane season.
And that's where the climate story and the inequality story fuse together into one thing.
The states with the least capacity to adapt are the ones getting hit hardest.
I wrote about something like this years ago in Bangladesh, different context, same brutal arithmetic.
Sí, y en México hay también un problema de corrupción en la construcción de carreteras.
Yes, and in Mexico there is also a corruption problem in road construction.
Muchas veces, las carreteras no tienen la calidad que el gobierno pagó.
Many times, the roads don't have the quality the government paid for.
El dinero desaparece.
The money disappears.
Y una carretera construida con mala calidad no resiste el agua ni los deslizamientos de tierra.
And a road built with poor quality doesn't hold up against water or landslides.
That's a detail I've heard from engineers and journalists covering infrastructure across Latin America for a long time.
The technical term is 'obra de mala calidad,' bad quality construction.
And it's not just corruption, sometimes it's also out-of-date design codes that were written before climate projections changed so dramatically.
Eso es muy importante.
That is very important.
Las carreteras que se construyeron hace veinte o treinta años no usaron datos de clima del futuro.
The roads that were built twenty or thirty years ago didn't use future climate data.
Usaron los datos del pasado.
They used past data.
Pero el clima ya es diferente.
But the climate is already different.
Las lluvias son más fuertes, los huracanes son más intensos.
The rains are stronger, the hurricanes are more intense.
Las carreteras viejas no estaban diseñadas para esto.
Old roads were not designed for this.
Right.
And this is a problem that's not unique to Mexico.
It applies to almost every country in the world, because virtually all infrastructure built before about 2010 was designed using historical climate assumptions that are now simply wrong.
Pero en los países ricos es más fácil renovar esa infraestructura.
But in rich countries it is easier to renew that infrastructure.
En México, en Nayarit, no hay dinero para reconstruir todas las carreteras.
In Mexico, in Nayarit, there isn't money to rebuild all the roads.
Entonces el riesgo continúa.
So the risk continues.
Y los que más sufren son las personas más pobres, porque ellas usan los autobuses públicos, no los coches privados.
And those who suffer most are the poorest people, because they use public buses, not private cars.
That point deserves to sit for a second.
The bus that went off the road in Nayarit was carrying ordinary people who didn't have the option of an SUV on a safer route.
Climate risk, in practice, is distributed according to income.
The people with the least are most exposed.
Y eso pasa en todo el mundo, Fletcher.
And that happens all over the world, Fletcher.
No solo en México.
Not only in Mexico.
Cuando hay una inundación o un desastre climático, los barrios ricos tienen mejores casas, mejores seguros, más opciones.
When there is a flood or a climate disaster, rich neighborhoods have better houses, better insurance, more options.
Los barrios pobres pierden todo y tienen que empezar de cero.
Poor neighborhoods lose everything and have to start from zero.
Let me bring up something that might surprise people who only think about Mexico's Pacific coast as a beach destination.
Nayarit sits right in what climatologists have identified as one of the corridors where tropical storm frequency is measurably increasing due to warmer sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific.
Sí, el agua del Pacífico está más caliente ahora.
Yes, the Pacific water is warmer now.
Y el agua caliente es energía para los huracanes.
And warm water is energy for hurricanes.
Un huracán que antes era de categoría uno puede llegar a categoría tres o cuatro más fácilmente.
A hurricane that used to be category one can more easily reach category three or four.
Y cuando llega a la costa, destruye todo: casas, puentes, carreteras.
And when it reaches the coast, it destroys everything: houses, bridges, roads.
Hurricane Patricia in 2015 made landfall near Jalisco with sustained winds of 215 miles per hour.
The strongest landfalling tropical cyclone ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere.
And the damage to road infrastructure in that region took years to fully address.
What did that look like on the ground?
Fue un desastre enorme.
It was an enormous disaster.
Muchas comunidades quedaron aisladas completamente porque las carreteras desaparecieron.
Many communities were completely isolated because the roads disappeared.
La gente no podía salir ni entrar.
People couldn't leave or enter.
Los hospitales no podían recibir medicamentos.
Hospitals couldn't receive medications.
Y algunas carreteras pequeñas en las montañas todavía no estaban bien reparadas cuando llegó la siguiente temporada de huracanes.
And some small mountain roads still weren't properly repaired when the next hurricane season arrived.
Isolated communities, blocked supply chains, hospitals cut off.
And that's the cascading effect that doesn't make the headline.
The headline is the hurricane wind speed.
The story that follows for months and years afterward is the infrastructure that can't recover fast enough.
Y aquí está el problema central, Fletcher.
And here is the central problem, Fletcher.
México necesita invertir mucho dinero en adaptar su infraestructura al cambio climático.
Mexico needs to invest a lot of money to adapt its infrastructure to climate change.
Nuevas carreteras más resistentes, nuevos puentes, mejores sistemas de drenaje.
New more resistant roads, new bridges, better drainage systems.
Pero ese dinero tiene que competir con otras necesidades urgentes: salud, educación, seguridad.
But that money has to compete with other urgent needs: health, education, security.
And Mexico isn't alone in that bind.
Almost every middle-income country faces the same impossible budget calculation.
Climate adaptation is expensive today, but the cost of not adapting is even higher over the long run.
The problem is that governments are elected on four or five year cycles and infrastructure investment pays off over thirty.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
Y hay otro factor: la corrupción en los contratos públicos.
And there is another factor: corruption in public contracts.
Cuando un político tiene que elegir entre gastar en una carretera resistente y cara, o en una carretera barata y de mala calidad donde alguien puede ganar dinero extra, muchas veces gana la segunda opción.
When a politician has to choose between spending on an expensive, resilient road, or on a cheap, poor-quality road where someone can make extra money, the second option often wins.
Es un problema estructural muy serio.
It is a very serious structural problem.
There was a report from Mexico's auditing authority a few years back, the Auditoría Superior de la Federación, that found systematic quality failures across major highway projects.
Not just cost overruns, but roads that were literally built to lower specifications than the contracts required.
Then the rain comes and you find out.
Y las personas que mueren en esos accidentes no son las personas que firmaron los contratos.
And the people who die in those accidents are not the people who signed the contracts.
Eso es lo que me parece más injusto de todo esto.
That is what I find most unjust about all of this.
Once personas murieron en Nayarit.
Eleven people died in Nayarit.
Nadie en una oficina en Ciudad de México va a ir a la cárcel por eso.
Nobody in an office in Mexico City is going to go to prison for that.
That's a hard thing to sit with.
And it raises a question I genuinely don't know the answer to: are there any countries in the developing world that are getting climate adaptation right?
Not perfectly, but meaningfully right?
Hay algunos ejemplos interesantes.
There are some interesting examples.
Bangladesh, por ejemplo, construyó muchos refugios contra ciclones cerca de la costa.
Bangladesh, for instance, built many cyclone shelters near the coast.
Ahora, cuando llega un ciclón, mueren muchas menos personas que antes.
Now, when a cyclone arrives, far fewer people die than before.
No porque los ciclones son menos fuertes, sino porque la gente tiene dónde ir.
Not because the cyclones are weaker, but because people have somewhere to go.
Bangladesh is a fascinating case.
A country with enormous vulnerability, sitting basically on a giant river delta, and they've made real strides in early warning systems and community-level preparedness.
The lesson there is that adaptation doesn't always require the richest solution.
Sometimes it requires the most localized one.
En México también hay comunidades que hacen cosas locales muy inteligentes.
In Mexico there are also communities doing very intelligent local things.
En algunas zonas de Oaxaca y Guerrero, las comunidades indígenas tienen sistemas tradicionales para gestionar el agua y proteger los terrenos durante las lluvias fuertes.
In some areas of Oaxaca and Guerrero, indigenous communities have traditional systems for managing water and protecting the land during heavy rains.
Son sistemas que existen desde hace siglos.
These are systems that have existed for centuries.
Indigenous water management.
I know a little about this.
Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations built terracing, aqueducts, and flood diversion systems that in some cases outperformed what colonial infrastructure replaced them with.
There's a real argument that some of the best climate knowledge in Mexico is several hundred years old.
Completamente.
Completely.
Y hay ingenieros y científicos mexicanos que estudian estos sistemas ahora para aprender de ellos.
And there are Mexican engineers and scientists studying these systems now to learn from them.
Es una combinación interesante: tecnología moderna y conocimiento tradicional.
It is an interesting combination: modern technology and traditional knowledge.
Pero esta combinación necesita dinero y apoyo político para funcionar a gran escala.
But this combination needs money and political support to work at large scale.
And political will is exactly where things tend to break down.
Let me ask you something more direct: do you think the Mexican government, federal level, has treated climate adaptation as a genuine priority in the last decade?
Or has it been mostly rhetoric?
La verdad es que hay más retórica que acción.
The truth is there is more rhetoric than action.
El gobierno de López Obrador, por ejemplo, invirtió mucho en el Tren Maya y en la refinería de Dos Bocas.
The government of López Obrador, for example, invested a great deal in the Tren Maya and the Dos Bocas refinery.
Esos proyectos son muy caros y algunos científicos dicen que dañan el medio ambiente.
Those projects are very expensive and some scientists say they damage the environment.
Al mismo tiempo, el presupuesto para adaptación climática bajó.
At the same time, the budget for climate adaptation went down.
That's a tension that repeats itself across Latin America.
Governments that sign climate agreements in Paris or Glasgow and then go home and fund extractive projects because that's where the short-term revenue is.
And they're not entirely wrong to think that way, because the communities they govern need jobs and energy now.
Claro, pero hay una contradicción clara.
Of course, but there is a clear contradiction.
Si México no adapta su infraestructura al clima, los costos de los desastres van a ser cada vez más grandes.
If Mexico doesn't adapt its infrastructure to the climate, the costs of disasters are going to keep getting larger.
Un huracán que destruye carreteras cuesta mucho más que construir carreteras más resistentes antes del huracán.
A hurricane that destroys roads costs much more than building more resistant roads before the hurricane.
La economía de la prevención es más inteligente que la economía de la emergencia.
The economics of prevention are smarter than the economics of emergency.
The World Bank has estimated that every dollar invested in disaster resilience saves about four dollars in future disaster response.
That ratio keeps appearing in the literature.
And yet governments globally still dramatically underfund the prevention side.
It's a collective action failure at a civilizational scale.
Y mientras los políticos debaten, once familias en Nayarit están llorando a sus muertos.
And while politicians debate, eleven families in Nayarit are mourning their dead.
Para mí, eso es lo más importante de recordar en esta conversación.
For me, that is the most important thing to remember in this conversation.
Detrás de cada estadística hay personas reales.
Behind every statistic there are real people.
That's right.
And I think that's actually a good place to pivot toward the language, because you said something a few minutes back in Spanish that caught my attention and I want to ask you about it.
You used the phrase 'empezar de cero.' Starting from zero.
Is that a literal expression or does it have a different weight in Spanish?
Buena pregunta.
Good question.
'Empezar de cero' significa empezar completamente desde el principio, sin nada.
'Empezar de cero' means to start completely from the beginning, with nothing.
Es como el inglés 'start from scratch.' Pero en español también decimos 'empezar desde cero', con 'desde' en lugar de 'de'.
It's like the English 'start from scratch.' But in Spanish we also say 'empezar desde cero', with 'desde' instead of 'de'.
Las dos formas son correctas.
Both forms are correct.
So 'de cero' and 'desde cero' are both fine.
And what's the difference between 'de' and 'desde' there, because I'll be honest, that's the kind of thing that trips me up completely.
They both feel like they mean 'from.'
'De' es más general y más corto.
'De' is more general and shorter.
'Desde' tiene más énfasis en el punto de origen, en dónde empiezas.
'Desde' puts more emphasis on the point of origin, on where you're starting from.
Por ejemplo: 'viajé de Madrid a Barcelona' es normal.
For example: 'I traveled from Madrid to Barcelona' is normal.
Pero si digo 'viajé desde Madrid', el mensaje es que Madrid fue el punto exacto donde empezó el viaje.
But if I say 'I traveled from Madrid', the message is that Madrid was the exact point where the journey began.
'Desde' da más fuerza al origen.
'Desde' gives more force to the origin.
So 'desde' is more emphatic, more pointed.
I like that.
It has a kind of insistence to it.
Starting not just from scratch but from this specific ground-zero moment.
Which, thinking about those families in Nayarit, is actually exactly the right word.
Sí.
Yes.
Y en este contexto, 'empezar desde cero' tiene un significado muy doloroso.
And in this context, 'empezar desde cero' has a very painful meaning.
No es solo una expresión casual.
It's not just a casual expression.
Cuando una familia pierde todo en un desastre, 'empezar desde cero' describe algo muy real y muy duro.
When a family loses everything in a disaster, 'starting from zero' describes something very real and very hard.
El idioma a veces captura exactamente la realidad.
The language sometimes captures reality exactly.