In Guatemalan Town Buried by Mud, Unyielding Hope for a Little Girl

The New York Times, Oct. 9, 2005

SOLOLÁ, Guatemala, Oct. 8 - Friday was the third day of the search, and still there was no sign of little Ana Castro Guzmán.

Her family's adobe house, built on the side of a mountain, had been consumed by a mudslide, one of dozens following Hurricane Stan this week that left at least 508 people dead and 337 missing across Guatemala. While estimates vary, as many as 105 more have been reported killed in Mexico and other parts of Central America.

Ana, 4, was swallowed with the house, along with her grandparents, her mother and four other children, ages 14, 11, 7 and 1. Two neighbors who tried to come to their rescue died when a second mudslide hit.

All the victims have been recovered and given proper burials - except Ana.

Dozens of friends and neighbors came with sticks and machetes to help her surviving relatives find her.

"This has caused us great pain," said Ramón Noj, one of Ana's uncles. "We feel sad because it is not only us, it is almost all our community that has been affected."

The rain that wreaked havoc from southern Mexico to El Salvador this week continued falling in Guatemala's highlands on Saturday. Still, the government had begun to bulldoze its way through mud-covered highways to reach stranded communities to deliver food, water and medicine; to rescue survivors from dozens of villages that had disappeared beneath the mud; and then to begin the dreadful search for the dead.

The nation's 24-hour news radio station reported searches all over the mountains, from Guatemala City to the border with Mexico. A house in the province of San Marcos had collapsed with nine people inside, six of them children. And then there was word that a shelter not far away had slid down a mountain, killing an estimated 50 people.

So far, however, the largest number of victims, about 117 of them, have come from this breathtaking area, inhabited mostly by peasant Mayan farmers, around Lake Atitlán.

Carlos Fernández, an agronomist at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, said part of the reason the mountains had melted into mud was the generations of deforestation. Others suggested that poverty played a role, and that poor farmers had settled in areas long at risk for such disasters. But there was no place else for them to go.

Now the people here have joined with rescue teams to claw away at the mud, to retrieve lost loved ones.

Some people realized the magnitude of the task and wondered aloud whether it was time to give up. Others said they were determined not to let nature have the final say over the dead.

"If what people tell us is true," said Benedicto Girón of Guatemala's civil defense agency, "there could be another 300 to 400 people dead there," around the lake.

That is indeed what the people here say. A 63-year-old elementary school custodian named Rafael Estrada hobbled, cold, hungry and traumatized, into a shelter here late Friday night from the village of Panabáj, which sits at the bottom of a volcano. The village had had about 260 houses, he said, but it does not exist anymore. "It's a floor of dirt," he said. "It's a desert."

He described roaring rivers of mud rushing down the mountain, burying the village in what seemed - as his life flashed before him - like an instant. Mr. Estrada, wrinkled and toothless, his loafers caked with mud, said he had been saved because he had rushed to the second floor of the school. Most of his family, except his sister and her three children, survived, too. Everything and everyone else that mattered to him was gone.

"There's no reason to go back there," he said.

Mario Sicajao, a reporter for a Christian radio station here, said the authorities had begun to acknowledge quietly that there was so much mud, believed to be dozens of feet deep in places, they might not be able to recover all the bodies in Panabáj.

"There is talk that if they can't get all the people who are buried there," he said, "then they are going to leave them there and declare it a national cemetery."

That is not what people here have in mind for Ana. By the end of the third day of their search, there was still no sign of her, but Mr. Noj, her uncle, said they would be back digging on Saturday, and Sunday, and for as long as it would take to find her.

"It is our tradition," he said, his bloodshot eyes peering from beneath a straw hat, "not to leave anyone behind."

Hundreds feared dead in Guatemala mudslide
Grim hunt for bodies after flooding across Central America, southern Mexico

Reuters News Service, Oct. 8, 2005

PANABAJ, Guatemala - Rescuers pulled 71 bodies from a mudslide in a Guatemalan village, and local officials feared hundreds more may have died in the worst single tragedy from rains that devastated Central America.

The mayor of a nearby town said up to 1,000 people may lie buried under the mud, in places 40 feet thick, in the village of Panabaj but that figure could not be confirmed.

Outside emergency teams, who only began digging Friday, two days after an avalanche of mud, rocks and trees engulfed the village, put the possible death toll at 200 people.

Firemen in muddied red uniforms carried a child's corpse covered only by a banana plant leaf on a makeshift stretcher of tree branches in Panabaj, in remote highlands next to the lakeside town of Santiago Atitlan.

Only tears left

Another rescue worker, his face contorted with grief, carried away a dead toddler wrapped in a plastic bag.

"There are no words for this. I have only tears left," said teacher Manuel Gonzalez, whose school was destroyed.

At least 282 people were confirmed killed in Central America and southern Mexico by floods and mudslides caused by heavy rains from Hurricane Stan.

Hundreds of homes at Panabaj were swallowed when a hillside collapsed in downpours in the early hours of Wednesday.

Diego Esquina, the mayor of Santiago Atitlan, told Reuters the death toll at Panabaj might be between 500 and 1,000.

Earlier Saturday, fire brigade spokesman Mario Cruz told Reuters, "there are no survivors here. It happened more than 48 hours ago. They are dead."

"According to the figures they gave me yesterday, approximately 1,400 people have disappeared," Cruz said.

Digging for bodies

Villagers and rescuers dug with spades in search of more victims but it was difficult to find bodies in the huge quagmire. They were considering abandoning the search and declaring the area a mass grave.

Hills sodden with rain gave way throughout Central America, burying flimsy homes made of wood and tin. Floodwaters covered huge swathes of land in the region and in southern Mexico.

Guatemala, where at least 186 people died, was worst hit. At least 67 people were killed in El Salvador, 15 in Mexico, 10 in Nicaragua and four in Honduras.

A Mexican Navy helicopter took time off from rescue efforts around the flooded southern city of Tapachula to fly into Guatemala to airlift 44 people stuck in the town of Malacatan just across the border.

Central America is particularly vulnerable to rain because so many people live in precarious, improvised dwellings dangerously close to riverbeds and on mountainsides.

Hurricane Mitch killed some 10,000 people in the region, mostly in mudslides, in 1998.

It makes you lose hope

The tops of lampposts and trees poked through a river of mud covering Panabaj.

"There were only houses here, for as far as you could see. ... It makes you lose hope," said Gonzalez, his voice cracking. "There are no children left, there are no people left."

The area is popular with U.S. and European tourists visiting the nearby Lake Atitlan, a collapsed volcanic cone filled with turquoise waters.

Some families were awakened in the middle of the night by rumblings from the volcano's slopes and managed to escape, but others were buried alive when a wall of mud crushed their homes a few hours later.

"If somebody had told us to leave, maybe the people would have got out. But they said nothing. Nothing," screamed Marta Tzoc, who grabbed her five children from their home and fled in time.

Bodies piling up

Across the region, mud-coated bodies piled up in morgues while survivors sobbed and said they needed food and water. Many did not know what had happened to relatives and were desperate for news.

Though Hurricane Stan fizzled out after hitting Mexico early this week, rain is forecast to continue into the weekend.

In Tapachula, Mexico -- a normally bustling town on the Guatemalan border that has been cut off since a wall of water tore through its center -- 72-year-old Luciano Aguilar stood guard with his dog by his destroyed riverside shantytown.

"This has never happened before," he said, surveying the pile of corrugated iron and smashed furniture that used to be his home. "I don't think they're going to let us keep living here."

Some 2,500 homes were destroyed in Tapachula and food was running short.

Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited.