Guatemala: 1 000 new orphans
2005-10-13 08:11
Guatemala City - Half of the 2 000 people killed by Tropical Storm Stan in Guatemala were children, and the natural disaster left about 1 200 orphans, according to preliminary figures released by Unicef on Wednesday.
Unicef's representative in Guatemala, Gladys Acosta, called on President Oscar Berger's government to step up efforts to prevent disease in the disaster zone and to provide psychological services to help children overcome their trauma.
"Their entourage has disappeared, they have lost their loved ones. They must be given priority and their basic needs must be met," she said.
Guatemala's attorney general Roberto Molina said the orphans would be placed with close relatives or put up for adoption.
Stan lashed Central America and Mexico with days of relentless rain starting October 1, triggering floods and landslides. As many as 2 055 died in flooding and mudslides in hardest-hit Guatemala. Forty-two others were killed in Mexico, 72 in El Salvador and 11 in Nicaragua.
Rescuers on Tuesday called off the search for hundreds of people buried for six days under solidifying mud in the towns of Panabaj and Tzanchaj, about 180km west of the capital.
More than 120 000 Guatemalans are still in shelters, most of them on the southern coast and in the departments of San Marcos and Solola, according to Guatemala's disaster agency,
Children in such shelters are beginning to suffer physical problems like diarrhoea and infected sores, health authorities warned.
On Wednesday, more than a week after the disaster began unfolding, international aid began pouring into the tiny Central American country, where more than three decades of civil war brutalised some of the same indigenous Mayan communities now decimated by natural disaster.
Food, medicine, drinking water, warm clothes and sanitary products from Spain, Venezuela and the United States were deposited at a military base in southern Guatemala to be delivered by helicopter to the west of the country.