Two hours of terror and now years of devastation for Acapulco's poor in Hurricane Otis aftermath

abcnews.go.com:

Hurricane Otis shredded Acapulco, Mexico, last week and tore apart the lives of hundreds of thousands of people

ACAPULCO, Mexico — Estela Sandoval Díaz was huddled in her tiny concrete bathroom, sure these were the final moments of her life, when Hurricane Otis ripped off her tin roof.

With it went clothing, savings, furniture, photos and 33 years of the life Sandoval built piece-by-piece on the forgotten fringes of Acapulco, Mexico.

Sandoval was among hundreds of thousands of people whose lives were torn apart when the fastest intensifying hurricane on record in the Eastern Pacific shredded the coastal city of 1 million, leaving at least 45 dead. The Category 5 hurricane damaged nearly all of Acapulco's homes, left bodies bobbing along the coastline and much of the city foraging for food.

While authorities were hard at work restoring order in Acapulco's tourist center — cutting through trees in front of high-rise hotels and restoring power — the city's poorest, like Sandoval, said they felt abandoned. She and hundreds of thousands others lived two hours of terror last week, and now face years of work to repair their already precarious lives.

“The government doesn’t even know we exist,” Sandoval said. “They’ve only ever taken care of the resort areas, the pretty places of Acapulco. They’ve always forgotten us.”

It’s a sentiment that has long simmered in the city but has grown as many accuse the government of leaving them to fend for themselves after Otis hit.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has deployed more than 10,000 troops to deal with the hurricane’s aftermath along with 1,000 government workers to determine needs. He said 10,000 “packages” of appliances and other necessities — refrigerators, stoves,