Tropical Storm claims 2 000
2005-10-12 08:14
Guatemala City - The death toll from devastating mudslides in Guatemala topped 2 000 on Tuesday, as rescuers called off their search for hundreds of people buried for six days under solidifying mud.
The decision brought the death toll from mudslides, heavy rains and flooding to 2 055 in Guatemala alone. Forty-two others were killed in Mexico, 72 in El Salvador and 11 in Nicaragua.
Guatemalan and Spanish firefighters had little hope of finding survivors as they searched with sniffer dogs after a mudslide on the San Lucas volcano, triggered by the relentless rains unleashed by Tropical Storm Stan, plowed into the towns of Panabaj and Tzanchaj.
"The search has been definitively called off," Mario Cruz, a spokesperson for volunteer firefighters, told AFP. "The 1 400 declared missing in Panabaj are dead."
President Oscar Berger touched down in the disaster zone on Tuesday, 186km west of the capital, on the edge of Lake Atitlan, normally one of Guatemala's top tourist attractions.
Wearing a surgical mask against the nauseating stench, he promised crowds of taciturn Mayan Indians that new housing and land would be provided away from the devastated area, which has been declared both a mass grave and a contamination zone.
"We are very worried about the situation, but I have the impression that we have never been so united," he said. "Together we will prevail," he told a sceptical audience.
Panabaj was declared an "area of high (health) risk" by the Guatemalan Red Cross, meaning the town was off-limits to everybody, including its inhabitants, and that its surroundings were to be evacuated, a spokesperson said.
But tens of thousands of residents of towns around the lake continued to drink its water and to use it for cooking, bathing and washing. "There is no other place to get water," Diego Martinez, mayor of the town of Santiago Atitlan, told AFP.
The threat of hunger and disease loomed elsewhere in Guatemala, in communities still cut off by floodwaters and mudslides, their crops destroyed and their water sources compromised.
Stan slammed the Mexican state of Veracruz as a hurricane a week ago, before being downgraded to a tropical storm.
Vice-president Eduardo Stein said the country needed $21.5m in emergency funds to provide food, blankets and medicine to an estimated 3.5 million people affected by the storm.
The damage is estimated at $800m.
The United Nations said it was launching a $22m flash appeal to assist victims in Guatemala.
Help has come from the US, Venezuela and Cuba.