The first rescue teams reaching isolated communities reported 133 more confirmed dead on Sunday, raising the death toll in mudslides in Guatemala linked to Hurricane Stan to 652 with 384 missing, as some Indian villages were converted into de facto cemeteries.
The new reports of dead and missing -- which could raise the death toll past 1,000 -- emerged from the first army and civil defense teams to reach the western township of Tacana, near the Mexico border, an area largely cut off from the rest of the country by mudslides that remained dangerously unstable.
Mayan Indian communities across Guatemala struggled with the conflicting demands of tradition -- which demands the recovery of bodies and decent burial -- with the shifting fields of mud. Many now say the vast mudflows will have to be declared graveyards.
"They [experts] have advised us not to dig anymore, because there is a great danger" that the still-soaked earth may collapse again, said Uvaldo Najera, a Tacana municipal employee reached by telephone.
Officials said Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchu Tum will travel to some of the hardest-hit villages, like Panabaj on the shores of Lake Atitlan, to hold consultations with Indian leaders on how to reconcile cultural traditions, while keeping the living from being injured in attempts to recover the dead.
An estimated 250 people are still believed to be encased in vast mud flows in Panabaj. More than 770 confirmed deaths and hundreds of missing in Central America and Mexico.
Indians leaders say they are exhausted by the days spent digging for victims since the Wednesday mudslides, and are worried about diseases from the decomposing corpses.
"Panabaj will no longer exist," Mayor Diego Esquina said, referring to the hamlet covered by a kilometer-wide mudflow as much as 4m to 6m thick. "We are asking that it be declared a cemetery. We are tired."
"The bodies are so rotted that they can no longer be identified. They will only bring disease," Esquina said.
Many of the missing apparently will simply be declared dead, and the ground they rest in declared hallowed ground. About 160 bodies have been recovered in Panabaj and nearby towns, and most have been buried in mass graves.
Promised sniffer dogs trained to detect bodies failed to arrive in time, and "we don't even know where to dig anymore" in the immensity of the mudflows, Esquina said.
Hundreds of Mayan villagers who had swarmed over the vast mudslides with shovels, picks and axes to dig for victims in previous days gave up their efforts on Sunday, overwhelmed by the task.
Vice President Eduardo Stein said steps were being taken to give towns "legal permission to declare the buried areas cemeteries" as "a sanitary measure."
As aid workers penetrated into the most remote areas, reports began to trickle in of death in strange and terrible forms. Some of the deaths in Tacana, about 20km from the Mexican border, reportedly occurred when a mudslide buried a building housing a storm shelter where about 100 people had taken refuge from rains and flooding.
The sensitivity of the Indian communities' past -- including tens of thousands of deaths at the hands of soldiers and death squads in the 1960-1996 civil war -- was clearly on display in Panabaj, where residents refused to even consider allowing troops in to help recover bodies. Esquina said that memories are still too vivid of a 1990 army massacre of 13 villagers on the same ground in Panabaj now covered by the mudslide.
"The people don't let soldiers to come in here, they won't accept it," Esquina said.
Meanwhile, thousands of hungry and injured survivors mobbed helicopters delivering the first food aid to communities that have been cut off from the outside world for nearly a week.
Helicopters -- including private craft, and US Blackhawks and Chinooks -- fanned out across the nation to evacuate the wounded and bring supplies to over 100 communities still cut off by the mudslides and flooding.
A US YouTuber who caused outrage for filming himself kissing a statue commemorating Korean wartime sex slaves has been sentenced to six months in prison, a court in Seoul said yesterday. Johnny Somali, 25, gained notoriety several years ago for recording himself doing a series of provocative stunts in South Korea and Japan, and streaming them on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. South Korean authorities indicted Somali — whose real name is Ramsey Khalid Ismael — in 2024 on public order violations and obstruction of business, and banned him from leaving the country. “The court has sentenced him to six months in
Former Lima mayor Rafael Lopez Aliaga, a Peruvian presidential hopeful, gathered hundreds of supporters in Lima on Tuesday and gave authorities 24 hours to annul the first round of the country’s election over allegations of fraud. Lopez Aliaga is locked in a tight three-way race with two other candidates for second place in Sunday’s vote. The election runner-up wins a ticket to June’s presidential run-off against front-runner Keiko Fujimori. “I am giving them 24 hours to declare this electoral fraud null and void,” said Lopez Aliaga, surrounded by a crowd of several hundred supporters. “If it is not declared null and void tomorrow,
Four contenders are squaring up to succeed Antonio Guterres as secretary-general of the UN, which faces unprecedented global instability, wars and its own crushing budget crisis. Chile’s Michelle Bachelet, Argentina’s Rafael Grossi, Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan and Senegal’s Macky Sall are each to face grillings by 193 member states and non-governmental organizations for three hours today and tomorrow. It is only the second time the UN has held a public question-and-answer, a format created in 2016 to boost transparency. Ultimately the five permanent members of the UN’s top body, the Security Council, hold the power, wielding vetoes over who leads the
A humanoid robot that won a half-marathon race for robots in Beijing on Sunday ran faster than the human world record in a show of China’s technological leaps. The winner from Honor, a Chinese smartphone maker, completed the 21km race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, said a WeChat post by the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, also known as Beijing E-Town, where the race began. That was faster than the human world record holder, Ugandan Jacob Kiplimo, who finished the same distance in about 57 minutes in March at the Lisbon road race. The performance by the robot marked a significant step forward
RSS