Tue, Oct 11, 2005 page7

• Deaths rise from Hurricane Stan

  BURIED ALIVE After a week, rescuers are still attempting to reach remote villages hit by mudslides. The death toll rose to 652 on Sunday with 384 missing

  • AP
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  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.
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