Mitch Kills At Least 7,000

Devastated Honduras appealed for help and set a curfew to stop looters as the "panorama of death" left by Hurricane Mitch swelled to biblical proportions Tuesday.

Their fragile economies ruined, impoverished Honduras and Nicaragua bore the brunt of horrific deluges and mudslides from a weeklong rampage by Mitch. Hundreds of people were buried in mud in the shadows of Nicaragua's Casita volcano.

Guatemala, pounded on Monday by the tail end of the fourth most powerful Atlantic hurricane on record, declared a state of emergency, and southern Mexico braced for its own punishment as heavy rain began to fall on southern Chiapas state.

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CBS News Correspondent Byron Pitts has an exclusive first-person report.

"Honduras is mortally wounded, but not about to expire. We will get back on our feet," said President Carlos Flores in an emotional television address to the nation. "May the Lord illuminate us and give us all strength."

Flores said he was swallowing his national pride to appeal for help from rich nations after floods submerged half the country and destroyed more than 70 percent of its crops, the economic mainstay of the country.

Flores suspended civil liberties and ordered a curfew to stop looters taking advantage of the chaos, especially in the capital Tegucigalpa, where a third of all homes had been swept into raging floodwaters or badly damaged.

The official death toll for Honduras still stood at 362 on Monday, but officials said they feared it would rise to 5,000.

CBS News Correspondent Byron Pitts reports that the mayor of Tegucigalpa, the capital of Hoduras, was killed in a helicopter crash during a flight to survey the damage.

In Nicaragua, Defense Minister Pedro Joaquin Chamorro toured villages hit by the collapsing slopes of the Casita volcano, 75 miles northwest of the capital Managua.

Of 164 houses which once made up the farming village of Rolando Rodriguez, only one was still standing on Monday in a vast sea of mud that stretched as far as the eye could see.

Half-buried and horribly disfigured bodies poked from mud that reached to the thighs, waiting to be doused with gasoline and set afire to prevent the spread of disease.

"It looks like a lunar landscape. It's hard to believe unless you have seen it with your own eyes," Chamorro said.

In one devastated village he visited, the minister said he saw a pig eating the corpse of a child.

The Nicaraguan government was considering declaring the whole area a "national cemetery".

The floods were the worst natural disaster to hit the country of 4.6 million, which was torn by bitter civil war in the 1980s, since a 1972 earthquake razed Managua.

"We have recovered from war. We have recovered from the earthquake. We will recover again. But we will need international support to recover as quickly as possible," Chamorro said.

Nicaragua's official bodycount remained at 808 on Monday. Nearly a fifth of the population had sought refuge in emergency shelters.

In El Salvador, the smallest country in the Americas, the national emergency committee increased its death toll late on Monday to 174 from 148, while Guatemala said at least 93 people there had died, bringing the total official tally for the whole region after a week of furious rains to 1,444.

The fate of 31 crew on board the four-masted schooner Fantome missing off the coast of Honduras for a week looked grim after the U.S. Coast Guard found debris from the ship.

Mexico offered to send its neighbors what help it could. Its southernmost, impoverished state of Chiapas evacuated people from high-risk Pacific coast areas as the first rains from Mitch swept across the Guatemalan border.

The state government said in a statement the Cacaluta and Novillero rivers had burst their banks in the coastal area, sweeping away two bridges.

In comments to reporters Tuesday, President Clinton said the U.S. would aid in the region's recovery.

These nations are our neighbors," Mr. Clinton said. "They are both close to our shores and close to our hearts...We must do whatever we can to help, and we will."

The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said if Mitch's feared death toll of 7,000 was confirmed, it would probably rank as the sixth most destructive Atlantic storm on record.

CBS This Morning Meteorologist Craig Allen reports that Mitch is a storm that just doesn't want to die all that quickly.

Once what is left of Mitch gets back out over the watr, it could begin to redevelop and strengthen into a new storm. Its eventual path might take it up through southern and central Florida.
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