Firemen race to save villagers

FIREFIGHTERS and villagers raced last night to unearth up to 400 Bolivians feared trapped under a mass of red clay, rocks and rubble after a landslide hit their village.

Justo Gareca, director of Bolivia's Civil Defence Corps announced up to 400 people may still be trapped under the rubble.

Bad weather and washed-out roads hampered a large-scale rescue effort to reach the victims buried by the landslide caused by heavy rains on Monday in the gold-mining town of Chima.

"We believe there must be between 300 and 400 people buried there,"

Defence Minister Freddy Teodovic told a news conference, saying he received preliminary reports a market and transportation terminal had been engulfed as well as houses.

Officials previously feared 200 people were missing in the area, which was declared a disaster zone by President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.

"The people here are resigned to the fact they will never know how many people were killed," said one doctor who arrived with a convoy of rescuers after a gruelling 10-hour journey to reach the town, accessible only by a winding 360-mile road.

Despite government plans to send in four helicopters, national guard troops and international rescue teams, only 20 firefighters had managed to arrive at the disaster area by last night.

Gareca said 300 rescue workers and national guardsmen began pulling bodies from the landslide yesterday. The town has begun to smell of decomposing bodies.

Villagers estimate about 50 miners and their families were trapped under the mass of earth about the size of two football pitches.

Chima is a tiny mining town of about 1,800 people about 125 miles north of La Paz. Doctors converted a covered basketball court into a makeshift clinic that later served as a vigil for the dead. A woman wandered around moaning, "How long must we live in this misery?"

The town's only school was turned into a makeshift hospital and morgue, while 80 people who lost their homes sheltered in the building.

"Everything I have was swept away by the mountain my husband, my young son, my house", said Margarita Esquivel, who went shopping minutes before the deluge of mud thundered down on the town.

Government officials have not released official statistics of the dead and missing, although reports suggest the bodies of 14 people have been recovered.

"We have no information because we can't get our helicopters into the area, so we don't have a clear picture of the destruction," said Freddy Teodovic, Bolivia's defence minister.

Villagers were frantically digging through the mountain of mud and rock to reach survivors. Rescue helicopters donated by the United States were expected to arrive yesterday.

Chima is an isolated, poor town where gold miners have burrowed into the mountain with explosions of dynamite for the past 70 years in search of a meagre living.

The mudslide was the latest in a series of similar disasters that have killed hundreds of people over the past decade in the gold-rich north near the border with Peru and Brazil, where miners in one of the Western Hemisphere's poorest countries pan for gold using century-old technology.

Sixty people were killed by a mudslide in the jungle gold-mining town of Mocotoro in 1998, while a mountain slide was estimated to have killed hundreds in 1992 in Llipi.

Thousands of people were killed by mudslides in Venezuela in 1999 on the mountainous northern coast near Caracas.