Guatemala: Landslide zones become burial grounds

The first rescue teams reaching Guatemala’s isolated communities reported 133 more confirmed fatalities, raising the death toll in mudslides linked to Hurricane Stan to 652 with 384 missing.

The new reports of dead and missing – which could raise the death toll past 1,000 – emerged from the first army and civil defence 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.