Without Halloween decorations or people in costumes and with enormous security devices and a new closed-circuit camera system to anticipate crowds. This is how Seoul is experiencing this weekend the first anniversary of the human avalanche that claimed 159 lives in the Itaewon neighborhood.

In the last decade, for any twenty-something in South Korea, Itaewon, famous for being the most multicultural neighborhood in the city, was the place to celebrate Halloween with costumes, alcohol and music until the early hours of the morning. The night of Saturday, October 29, 2022 changed everything.

After almost three years of restrictions caused by the pandemic, some 100,000 people, eager to be able to celebrate freely again, took to the streets of this neighborhood that once housed the largest US military base in South Korea and is a meeting point for the LGBTI community and home to the largest Muslim community in the country.

The Yongsan City Hall, where Itaewon is located, did not prepare any specific police force despite the fact that local businessmen had warned that in previous years the crowd had reached dangerous levels.

The emergency services in turn dismissed dozens of calls from pedestrians who, hours before the avalanche, had warned about crowds.

Shortly after 10:00 p.m., the number of people crammed into an alley barely four meters wide that connected a subway exit with a pedestrian street full of bars and clubs became unsustainable; Many began to fall and bodies piled up on top of each other, and some of those who remained standing also stopped being able to breathe.

Amid great confusion and apparent failures in the chains of command, it took emergency services more than two hours to get everyone out of the alley, which is just over 30 meters long.

It is believed that around a hundred people died on that street, many others did so in the hospital or while trying to revive them on the sidewalk, and a high school student – who was later officially recognized as the 159th fatal victim of the tragedy – took his own life a month and a half later after losing two friends in the fateful avalanche that he had initially survived.

This weekend, the atmosphere in Itaewon has nothing to do with previous years: there is not a single skull or pumpkin in shop windows and terraces, you can barely see one or two costumes, the crowd looks like any other Friday or Saturday, and the Streets have literally been armored.

Police and volunteers with glow sticks order pedestrian traffic at each intersection, strongly regulated by fences installed in the alleys to divide them into two one-way lanes.

Along the main avenues, there are rows of ambulances and emergency stations.

In places like Hongdae, a university neighborhood par excellence in Seoul, the authorities displayed posters urging “not to celebrate Halloween”, since the area is the main candidate to absorb the people who traditionally came to Itaewon to celebrate.

In any case, the panorama is identical to that of Itaewon: extreme security and little festive atmosphere, as if dressing up were now taboo.

In addition to the more than 1,200 officers deployed in Seoul’s busiest nightlife areas, the city this year adopted a system by which a computer program counts people using images from closed-circuit cameras installed in streets normally crowded.

The system activates alarms if it detects signs of dangerous crowding, but for the families of those who died in Itaewon, both this and the huge deployments of police and emergency personnel seem like a vain attempt to make amends for the serious mistakes of that night. .

The association that brings them together has denounced the abandonment of the authorities and the fact that the police investigation into the event, which was closed with 16 accused, did not affect important government or police positions due to serious negligence, by virtue of which The families insist, the South Korean State proved incapable of guaranteeing safety on public roads.

Now they only hope that Parliament will soon approve a law to reopen the investigations at the hands of an independent committee that will provide the many answers that families and loved ones demand.