Tribe Hard Hit By Floods, Mud
Central American Death Toll Tops 1,000; Many Are Sutujil Indians
-
Play CBS Video Video Guatemala Ends Rescue Effort CBS News RAW: Guatemalan communities buried under rivers of mud by Hurricane Stan will be abandoned and declared graveyards. Many of the missing will simply be declared dead.
-
-
An aerial view from a U.S. Army helicopter shows the destruction from a recent mudslide, one of many near the town of Panajachel, Guatemala. (AP)
-
A man walks through the mud as he crosses the international checkpoint on the border of Mexico-Guatemala at Ciudad Hidalgo, the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico. (AP)
-
Guatemalan boys stand in a rainstorm following the arrival of a U.S. Army Chinook helicopter making a humanitarian delivery, in San Marcos, Guatemala, Oct 9, 2005. (AP)
-
Guatemalans look on as police unload food aid into a truck from a U.S. Army Chinook helicopter making a humanitarian delivery, in San Marcos, Oct. 9. 2005. (AP)
-
Villagers try to get a hand on the food being distributed by the Guatemalan Army in the flooding ravaged communities near Puerto San Jose, Escuintla, 68 miles south of Guatemala City, Sunday. (AP)
-
-
Photo Essay Hurricane Stan A major storm brings rainfall and deadly mudslides to Central America.
-
Fast Facts Guatemala Learn about the people, economy and history.
Guatemalan officials were likely to give up searching for 384 missing throughout the region. They will likely be added to the 652 people already declared dead across Guatemala from torrential rains last week associated with Hurricane Stan, raising the total number killed to more than 1,000. Another 133 people were killed in El Salvador, Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Honduras.
In Guatemala's isolated western township of Tacana, near the Mexico border, rescue workers on Sunday recovered more than 130 bodies from a mudslide that buried a shelter where people had taken refuge from rains and flooding.
In Panabaj, a community on the outskirts of Santiago Atitlan buried by a mudflow a half-mile wide and up to 20 feet thick, residents on Sunday blocked troops who had come to help dig out victims.
"The people don't want soldiers to come in here. They won't accept it," said Panabaj Mayor Diego Esquina, who said memories are still too vivid of a 1990 army massacre of 13 villagers. In all, tens of thousands died in Guatemala at the hands of soldiers and death squads in the 1960-96 civil war.
"There is a very strong resistance in the name of maintaining their culture," said Rodolfo Pocop, 35, a Santiago Atitlan resident who represents a national Indian rights group.
All the mudslide victims are Sutujil Indians. There are only about 100,000 Sutujil Indians in the country, and all live in communities on the shores of Lake Atitlan, Pocop said.
"It was a very severe blow to this ethnic group," he said.
The Indians struggled Monday to reconcile the demands of tradition - which require that bodies be recovered and buried exactly 24 hours after dying - with the shifting fields of mud and rotting corpses.
Experts "have advised us not to dig anymore because there is a great danger" that the still-soaked earth may collapse again, said Uvaldo Najera, a Tacana municipal employee reached by telephone.
Esquina said community leaders have asked that the area be declared a cemetery.
"We are tired," he said. "The bodies are so rotted that they can no longer be identified. They will only bring disease."
©MMV The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.q
More From World
Author Thomas Friedman on Obama's Afghanistan plan and the war on terror.
