Guatemala Flood and Mudslide Updates

It took a while, but it seems the floods and mudslides in Guatemala have finally begun to register on the radar of the US news organizations. I guess the number of deaths and the dramatic images were tragic enough to break through the invisible barrier that usually keeps news from Guatemala out of the mainstream media.

Obviously a disaster of this magnitude generates a countless number of stories, most of which will never be published. And, outside of Guatemala, attention will soon turn to other happenings. In fact, with the even more horrific (at least in purely numerical terms) earthquake in Pakistan, it will not be long before Guatemala once again fades from CNN and Yahoo news.

With that in mind, here are some of the Guatemalan stories currently capturing the world's attention:

Hurricane Stan toll hits 2000

By Edgar Calderon, The Courier Mail News

Guatemala City. The death toll from devastating mudslides in Guatemala topped 2000 overnight, as rescuers called off their search for hundreds of people buried for six days under solidifying mud.

The decision brought the death toll from the mudslide and accompanying heavy rains and flooding to 2052 in Guatemala alone. Some 652 people had previously been confirmed dead in Guatemala, and 1400 had been listed as missing. Forty-two others were killed in Mexico, 72 in El Salvador and 11 in Nicaragua.

Guatemalan and Spanish firefighters had little hope of finding survivors as they searched with sniffer dogs after a mudslide on the San Lucas volcano, triggered by the relentless rains unleashed by Tropical Storm Stan, ploughed into the towns of Panabaj and Tzanchaj.

The local mayor had asked the central government earlier to declare the devastated area a mass grave.

Panabaj was declared an "area of high (health) risk" by the Guatemalan Red Cross, meaning the town was off-limits to everybody, including its inhabitants, and that its surroundings were to be evacuated, a spokesman said.

The mudslides not only affected the Panabaj area but also Tacana, a town near the Mexican border. The racial aspect of poverty in Guatemala was also exposed by this tragedy:

Guatemala's Maya Indians hit hard in new tragedy

By Catherine Bremer

Tacana, Guatemala (Reuters) - Villagers mourned their dead on Tuesday and sprinkled lime over the mass graves of hundreds buried in huge mudslides, putting a seal on the latest tragedy to hit Guatemala's Maya Indians.

At the edge of this town in the high mountains of western Guatemala, rescuers in the hamlet of Cua called off attempts to recover more victims from the mudslide that swallowed two churches, a school and a communal dining room on Thursday.

"We pulled the dead out without any help. One came out without a head. It was horrible. There were a lot of children," said Mario Ortiz, a 34-year-old father of five who said he now has trouble sleeping.

Forty-eight bodies were recovered but 32 others who disappeared in the muck will now stay there forever.

"They are very deep. There is too much mud and they are way inside there, they are too deeply buried," said rescue worker Oscar Mendez.

Corn fields and homes were ruined, so the survivors of the rains face even deeper poverty in what was already a depressing town of half-built homes with poor basic services and tenuous road links to the outside world.

Eulalio Bravo, 29, stood clutching a child in his arms and mourned the friends and neighbors sucked away in the mud.

"We are all of the same blood," he said, adding that the government had again left rural Indians to die alone with little or no help. "We are very forgotten. They don't even talk about us in the city."

Once the region's dominant culture, Maya Indians fell under Spanish rule around 500 years ago and have remained isolated and impoverished ever since, even though they still make up 60 percent of Guatemala's population.

During a 36-year war that ended only in 1996, Mayans bore the brunt of brutal army-led campaigns that razed entire villages. An estimated 200,000 people were killed in the war, most of them Indians.

Mayan villages have the highest levels of malnutrition, illiteracy and poverty, and the lowest levels of government spending on health, education and infrastructure.

Read the entire article

The disaster also had political and historical overtones...

Guatemala's Indians Refuse Soldiers' Help

By Mark Stevenson, AP

Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala - A Guatemalan Indigenous community, haunted by a government-sponsored massacre during the country's brutal civil war, refused soldiers' help Monday in recovering those killed in a week of flooding and mudslides and conducted its own searches instead.

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.

Read the entire article

Thankfully the U.S. and other countries are responding to the call for aid:

Guatemala Relies on Aid After Floods

By Mark Stevenson, AP

Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala - Authorities abandoned efforts Tuesday to recover bodies from a deadly landslide and turned to international agencies to help feed, clothe and treat the tens of thousands of residents who lost everything in a week of deadly rains and floods.

The government Monday night issued an urgent call to the United Nations , seeking $21.5 million in aid because its own emergency response funds would not be enough to cope with the crisis.

The United States has delivered 5,000 hygiene kits, 5,000 blankets, 15,000 gallons of drinking water and 11,000 gallons of fuel to victims in Guatemala, officials said. U.S. helicopters shuttled food and water to isolated villages and a medical unit from the Arkansas National Guard also was preparing to go to the region.

"There are so few of these kinds of problems that any one (country) can handle alone," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday while en route to meetings in Florida with security leaders from seven Central American countries. "It looks like it‘s a terrible natural disaster. It‘s heartbreaking."

UNICEF said Tuesday that more than a third of storm victims were children and that it was rushing emergency relief supplies to communities both in Central America and southern Mexico.

Read the entire article

Breaking news: I'm saddened to say that, according to a Cerigua news bulletin, Dominga Vásquez Julajuj, the indigenous mayor of Sololá and member of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) political party, was just denied a visa to the United States.

Dominga was invited to Ireland to participate in a Human Rights workshop, to raise awareness of the natural disaster, and to seek aid for the victims. Now she will have to choose a flight which does not have a layover in the United States.

Cuban doctors are already on the ground in Guatemala assisting the afflicted communities:

Cuba Sends Doctors to Guatemala and Offers Them to Pakistan

Havana. President Fidel Castro today offered the president of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf, the services of 200 doctors; a similar number of doctors, specialized in natural disasters, are already in Guatemala.

Yoandra Muro, leader of the Cuban permanent medical mission in Guatemala, confirmed that 200 members of Cuba's Henry Reeve International Contingent of Doctors Specialized in Disaster Situations and Serious Epidemics are already in Guatemala.

That medical force was established as a result of the Cuban offer to send experienced professionals to help victims of hurricane Katrina in southern areas of the US, which was turned down by the Bush administration.

As a symbolic coincidence, the first active members of the "Henry Reeve" contingent left Havana on October 8, the anniversary of the fall in combat of Commander Ernesto Che Guevara, a doctor and supreme example of internationalism.

Another 200 members of the Contingent, each one provided with two knapsacks with 24 kilograms of medicines, are getting ready to join in the humanitarian effort.

Read the entire article

And finally... an uplifting story amidst the sorrow:

Guatemalan sisters in miracle escape from mudslide

By Frank Jack Daniel

Panabaj, Guatemala (Reuters) - When a volcano slope above their home collapsed, sisters Rosa and Elena Quicain were swept from the bed they share into a raging torrent of mud and rocks that became a mass grave for hundreds.

Somehow, they survived it.

The giant landslide, which killed up to 1,400 Maya Indians in the Guatemalan village of Panabaj last Wednesday, shattered their home, killed their mother and five siblings, and carried them 100 yards downstream to the brink of death.

Rosa, 20, was sucked deep under the mud, pummeled by rocks and tree trunks, and says she felt herself starting to lose consciousness.

"That's when I reacted. I pulled myself out bit by bit, climbing to the surface using only one arm, supporting myself with logs that were under there," she said through swollen lips at the house of a distant relative, a nurse who has taken 16 landslide survivors into her home in a nearby town.

Elena, 18, said she finally came to a halt in the mudslide, buried up to her mouth with both arms trapped at her sides.

"When I heard voices, I did everything possible to free my arm. I dug the mud from my mouth with my fingers and started screaming for help," she said, her eyeballs shot with blood.

Her elder sister recognized her voice in the chaos.

Read the entire article

Tags: Guatemala, Stan, Mudslides, Floods, Disaster, Disaster

Posted by elcanche at October 11, 2005 04:50 PM