Guatemala flooding death toll passes 500

A week of mudslides and flooding have left more than 500 people dead and another 337 missing across Guatemala, federal emergency officials said today, dramatically raising the previous death toll.

The latest figures included a landslide in western Guatemala, along the border with Mexico, that killed 37 people.

Guatemala has borne the brunt of heavy rains exacerbated by Hurricane Stan, which made landfall Tuesday on the Mexican Gulf Coast before quickly weakening to a tropical depression.

Governments in Central America and Mexico were still struggling today to reach isolated areas devastated by a week of intense rains and landslides.

On the banks of the mountain Lake Atitlan, dozens of Mayan Indian villagers swarmed over a vast river of congealed mud that covered trees and houses, digging with hand tools for bodies under a landslide that swallowed an entire neighbourhood.

Primitive wooden coffins piled up in the cemetery in Santiago Atitlan, waiting for badly decomposed bodies. Villagers held sprigs of native herbs to ward off odours as they dug mass graves for bodies that would be buried without names.

“Entire families have disappeared,” said Diego Sojuel, of the Santiago Atitlan municipal aid committee. “In some cases there is no one that can identify the cadavers. And in other cases it is because of the state of putrefaction that we are going to have to bury them without names.”

Chris Needham, 24, of London, paused to wonder aloud whether some areas might eventually have to be declared a burial ground.

“That’s people’s families under there,” he said. ”They’re not going to stop digging. I wouldn’t stop.”