Ragtag team tackles effort's grimmest task

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia -- In the three weeks since catastrophe struck, this city has seen its share of body collectors, but none quite like Hector "Chino" Mendez and the Tlatelolco International Rescue Brigade.

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Mendez, a grizzled, unemployed rescuer from Mexico City, and his men -- nicknamed Los Topos, or "the Moles" -- virtually hitchhiked from Mexico to the tip of northern Sumatra to help remove thousands of corpses that remain entombed in the debris from the Dec. 26 earthquake and tsunami.

"We are penniless," Mendez concedes, telling the story of how the heavily discounted tickets from Japan Air Lines took them only as far as Singapore. There, the rescue brigade ran out of money paying for ferry tickets to Indonesia, and had to leave much of its equipment behind. The workers made it to Banda Aceh only because a Baptist minister on the ferry overheard them arguing about the equipment and gave Mendez $400 -- exactly the amount they needed to get here.

Now, belying their fame as volunteer rescue and recovery experts at disaster sites around the world, they camp in the yard of the governor's mansion, the disaster command post. They occupy tents distributed by the Chinese government, eat cookies and water given to them by aid groups, and hitch rides to disaster sites from Indonesian police trucks.

When they are not wading in knee-deep mud and debris collecting bodies, they are teasing each other, comparing their muscles, and taking a dancing marionette around to refugee camps and hospitals.

It's against their philosophy to count how many bodies they remove.

"That's not important," says Javier Maldonado, a 20-year-old Topo.

On a recent afternoon, the Topos jumped out of a police truck in front of a collapsed department store and swaggered up to the scene in bright orange jumpsuits donated by a Mexican foundation. They surveyed the giant slabs of metal and concrete and rubbed their stubbly chins, discussing in Spanish how to attack it. Between the 12 of them, the only tool they had was a single household hammer.

Undaunted, Mendez took a moment to wax poetic to a woman who was standing beside him.

"When I am removing the corpses, I think of a beautiful woman doing her laundry," he told her, touching her arm and then scratching the salt-and-pepper beard and mustache that sprout beneath his square sunglasses.

On one leg, he carries a machete from the southern Mexican state of Chiapas in an ornately carved holster, but it is too dull to cut much that needs cutting in Banda Aceh. On his head, he sports a kaffiyeh-style headdress that had been given to him last year in Iran, when Los Topos went to excavate bodies and rescue survivors after the earthquake in Bam.   Continued...