Hurricane inflicts massive death toll in Guatemala

As of Saturday, Guatemalan government officials had confirmed 530 dead and 337 missing, with close to 100,000 made homeless by the natural disaster.

Worst hit was the area around Santiago Atitlán, where several coffee-growing communities disappeared under a massive wall of mud, described as half a mile wide and up to 20 feet deep. These included the small Indigenous town of Panabaj and the neighboring community of Tzanchaj.

Guatemalan volunteer firefighters’ spokesman Mario Cruz gave an estimate of 1,400 people dead. “There are no survivors here, it has already been 48 hours that they are dead,” he said Saturday. Firefighters and local residents had worked round the clock trying to dig through the mud with shovels, axes and machetes in hope of rescuing survivors.

“Panabaj will no longer exist,” said the town’s mayor Diego Esquina. “We are asking that it be declared a cemetery. We are tired. We no longer know where to dig.”

The mayor of Santiago Atitlán, about six miles from Panabaj, said that he estimated the death toll in the area at between 500 and 1,000 people.

Local villagers who escaped the disaster with their lives said that after several days of rain, the sides of two volcanoes gave way on Wednesday, sending down a wall of mud and debris that crushed homes, businesses and schools with many of the local residents trapped inside them.

“Thousands of people are still waiting for food and water, stunned by the mud and water that has risen to their knees, while others are unable to stand on the ground as the water has reached the roofs of their homes where they wait desperately to be rescued,” according to a report from the Guatemalan news service Cirigua. The report described terrified survivors of the mudslides in San Marcos “who still hear the shouts of people who were trapped between the mud and the rubble of a church in which they had sought refuge.”

Meanwhile, the Guatemalan press has indicated that the devastation has unleashed a wave of price gouging, with businesses doubling the price of fuel, bottled water and other basic necessities in the affected areas.

The catastrophe is the worst to strike the impoverished region since Hurricane Mitch in 1998. That storm claimed some 10,000 lives throughout Central America, with 268 deaths in Guatemala.

In addition to the far greater death toll this time, the economic impact on Guatemala is also far more severe. According to a government estimate, 30 percent of the country’s crops were wiped out by the storms, causing over $400 million in losses. Large sections of processing industries have also been forced to shut down, resulting in widespread layoffs of workers.

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/oct2005/guat-o10.shtml