Mudslide kills 1400 in Guatemalan village

PANABAJ, Guatemala - Around 1400 people died under a huge mudslide in the Guatemalan village of Panabaj that was triggered by torrential rains from Hurricane Stan, the fire brigade said.

"There are no survivors here. It happened more than 48 hours ago. They are dead," brigade spokesman Mario Cruz told Reuters.

The landslide engulfed the Maya Indian village on Wednesday in a fatal quagmire of mud, rock and trees, in places 12 metres thick.

"According to the figures they gave me yesterday, approximately 1400 people have disappeared," Cruz said.

The deaths nearly tripled earlier estimates of the toll of storm-related fatalities in the poor, Central American nation. Stan claimed another 67 lives in El Salvador, 15 in Mexico, 10 in Nicaragua and four in Honduras.

Large swathes of land in Central America and Mexico were flooded and dozens of mountain villages were hit by mudslides after days of downpours.

The storm was a low-strength Category 1 hurricane and soon fizzled out but it dumped enough rain on Central America to be a killer.

The region is particularly vulnerable to rain because so many people live in precarious, improvised dwellings dangerously close to riverbeds and on mountainsides.

Hurricane Mitch killed some 10,000 people in Central America, mostly in mudslides, in 1998.

Rescue workers, struggling through roads blocked by mud, only reached Panabaj on Friday, two days after the tragedy.

Exhausted villagers and firemen dug with spades looking for more victims but it was difficult to find bodies. They were considering abandoning the search and declaring the area a mass grave.

Another 40 people died at the nearby hamlet of Samac.

The tops of lampposts and trees poked through a river of mud covering Panabaj.

"There are no children left, there are no people left," said teacher Manuel Gonzalez, whose school was destroyed. "There were only houses here, for as far as you could see. ... It makes you lose hope."

The area is popular with US and European tourists visiting the nearby Lake Atitlan, a collapsed volcanic cone filled with turquoise waters.

Some families woke in the middle of the night to rumblings from the volcano's slopes and managed to escape, but others were buried alive when a wall of mud crushed their homes a few hours later.

"If somebody had told us to leave, maybe the people would have got out. But they said nothing. Nothing," screamed Marta Tzoc, who grabbed her five children from their home and fled in time.

Across the region, mud-coated bodies piled up in morgues while survivors sobbed and said they needed food and water. Many did not know what had happened to relatives and were desperate for news.

- REUTERS