Rescuers in a Guatemalan village struggled yesterday to find the remains of up to 1,400 Maya Indians killed in a mudslide triggered by Hurricane Stan, while officials considered whether to declare the village a mass grave.
A small group of firefighters poked long poles into the brown mud that blanketed the village of Panabaj in search of victims but feared sinking into the quagmire themselves.
"It is very difficult. Most of the people are where the mud is thickest and we haven't been able to work there because of the danger," said firefighter Max Chiquito.
Stan's rains sent an avalanche of mud, rocks and trees crashing down a volcano's slopes and into Panabaj as people slept early on Wednesday, covering it in mud up to 40 feet deep in places.
Rescue workers did not reach the area until Friday and might have to abandon their search under a Guatemalan law that for health reasons puts a 72-hour limit on finding the dead.
Maya Indians traditionally put great importance on giving the dead a proper ritual burial.
Dozens of corpses have been recovered and locals were drawing up names of the missing and dead. With so many victims feared buried, authorities said they might abandon the search and declare the village a mass grave.
"We're more concerned with getting food to the people who are alive," Ana Luisa Olmedo, a spokeswoman for Guatemala's civil protection agency, said on Saturday night.
The storm killed some 300 people elsewhere in Guatemala and 103 others in the rest of Central America and southern Mexico.
Some 1,400 people who have disappeared in Panabaj, next to the lakeside tourist town of Santiago Atitlan, are dead, according to the fire department. A local official in charge of compiling death lists put the likely toll at about 1,000.
Pope Benedict offered condolences for the hurricane victims during his weekly blessing in St. Peter's Square .
Volunteers uncovered the body of a young girl, her twisted arm poking out from under the mud, on Saturday. They then found what appeared to be another corpse nearby but the search for victims was suspended as rain fell again, threatening to trigger new mudslides.
Behind a makeshift rope barrier, dozens of women awaited news of missing kin.
José Tacaxoy (28) sat in the mud near one of several trenches being dug in the quagmire, clutching a tattered photograph of his brother's wife with her three children. "My brother is a salesman and was away when it happened. The rest are dead," he said, choking back tears. He had a list of 11 missing cousins and there was a cross through the name of the only one whose body had been found. - (Reuters)