‘Frida Sofia’: The Mexico Earthquake Victim Who Never Was (Published 2017) (2023)

Her plight captured the attention of the Mexican public: a 12-year-old girl, trapped in the rubble of a collapsed elementary school as rescuers rushed to save her.

Television cameras fixed their attention on the frantic rescue operations after a devastating earthquake toppled the school on Sept. 19. Tidbits of information about the child, whom some began to identify as “Frida Sofia,” trickled out. Some reported that she was with five other children, some that she had spoken to rescuers and was wiggling her fingers, still others that she had been sent water.

But a day later, the world learned the truth: Frida Sofia did not exist. No children were believed to be alive in the building, according to Mexican Navy officials.

So how did the nation, including emergency medical workers, some officials and news outlets, get it so wrong?

How Frida Sofia’s story began.

The Enrique Rébsamen school collapsed on that Tuesday when a 7.1-magnitude earthquake hit Mexico City. People rushed to pull injured children from the school, but hope soon dwindled.

By evening of the next day, the military, the police and local volunteers had been digging for more than 24 hours. That is when reports emerged of a girl who was alive inside the rubble — a story of hope when a devastated country painfully needed one.

It is unclear who first made the claim, but Televisa, the country’s largest television news network, was the first to air the report. The news was relayed by a reporter, Danielle Dithurbide, who said the information had come from leaders of the rescue teams. She was one of the only reporters allowed inside the police cordon around the building at that point.

In her report, Ms. Dithurbide said that rescuers had told her that a 12-year-old girl was trapped, and that she had been found using a thermal scanner. Rescue teams had made contact with the child, she told viewers, and her name was “Frida Sofia.” Rescuers were withholding the last name, the reporter said.

“I asked, ‘Your name?’” the man said. “She said, ‘Sofi, Sofi.’”

In the early hours of last Thursday, The Associated Press quoted another rescue worker with a similar story. The New York Times, among other news organizations, published this report.

“Rescue worker Raul Rodrigo Hernandez Ayala came out from the site Wednesday night and said that ‘the girl is alive, she has vital signs,’” the news agency reported, “and that five more children had been located alive. ‘There is a basement where they found children.’”

According to the report: “Helmeted workers spotted the girl buried in the debris early Wednesday and shouted to her to move her hand if she could hear. She did, and a rescue dog was sent inside to confirm she was alive. One rescuer told local media he had talked to the girl, who said her name was Frida.” (At the time, the military also had a search and rescue dog on site named Frida, which may have contributed to the confusion.)

The story grew from there as more news outlets reported the information. Soon #FridaSofia was trending on Twitter.

Officials confirmed the initial reports.

From Thursday morning, it seemed that most rescuers were working under the assumption that a girl was alive in the rubble. Footage taken by one journalist at the scene showed a rescuer shouting to a colleague and asking where he should dig, before being told to focus on an area.

Most journalists could not get close to the scene. They were relying on rescue workers, rather than officials, to relay information. Many of those workers had been on the site for hours.

Then officials began to repeat parts of the same story.

On Thursday morning, a navy officer, Adm. José Luis Vergara, told Televisa that there appeared to be a girl inside but that they could not pinpoint her location. “There’s a girl alive in there, we’re pretty sure of that, but we still don’t know how to get to her,” Admiral Vergara said.

Then the navy backtracked. The Naval Secretariat said in a statement that 11 children had been rescued from the school, and that the bodies of 19 children and six adults had been recovered. But no students were believed to still be trapped inside, it said. The body of a seventh adult was discovered on Sunday.

“We want to emphasize that we have no knowledge about the report that emerged with the name of a girl,” the navy’s assistant secretary, Ángel Enrique Sarmiento, said last Thursday. “We never had any knowledge about that report, and we do not believe — we are sure — it was not a reality.”

Mr. Sarmiento said that a thermal camera lowered into the rubble of the school had detected blood, but that the only person still listed as missing was a school employee. At least one body was removed from the rubble last Thursday morning, after the Frida Sofia story emerged — that of a 58-year-old woman — and it could have been her fingers that rescuers had seen.

The confusion of collective trauma.

From the beginning, there were doubts about Frida Sofia. Some news outlets reported that her name could not be found on the school’s roll book. Last Thursday, the Ministry of Education issued an appeal for families of students who might be missing, and said it had been 12 hours since the ministry had heard from anyone.

Televisa later said its reporting had been based on interviews with rescuers and official sources, and demanded an explanation from the navy as to why it had retracted its earlier statements.

“Our goal was always to avoid rumors and the dissemination of false information,” Televisa said in a statement. “That is why we approached the Navy, which is the highest coordinating command of these rescue tasks.”

In a video message on Friday, Ms. Dithurbide, the reporter, said that the authorities had limited her access and that she had done her best to verify information with rescue workers.

Alejandro Reyes Reyes, a psychology professor at University Santo Tomás in Chile who specializes trauma caused by natural disasters, said the earthquake’s effect on the community might help explain the spread of misinformation.

“As a result of our anxiety and expectations, we interpret the information provided by rescuers in a distorted way,” Mr. Reyes said in an email. “It is demonstrated that our perception and attention is selective, that is, it is restricted by our experiences and socio-affective elements, such as the desire to find a person who has disappeared from the disaster or find a loved one alive in the rubble of a collapsed building.”

Mr. Reyes said this could lead people to “transform the information” and sometimes spread misinformation.

The “Frida Sofia” story mirrors an earlier case of this kind of collective confusion.

A Spanish newspaper, El País, reported a similar case in 1985, after a devastating earthquake that hit Mexico City 32 years to the day before the most recent quake. Rescuers spent days digging for a 9-year-old boy called Monchito, only to find out that he did not exist.

At the time, a psychologist called the episode a result of “collective psychosis.”