SANTA CATARINA PINULA, Guatemala (Reuters) – Despair in the search for hundreds of people buried in a landslide that swallowed part of a Guatemalan town is so deep that some relatives feel lucky simply to have found the bodies of their loved ones.
Families yesterday lit candles for relatives engulfed by a mass of earth and rubble that crashed down on a neighborhood in Santa Catarina Pinula. Rescue teams have found more than 130 bodies and up to 300 others are missing, feared dead.
“I feel lucky because other families can’t even cry over their dead,” said Alejandro Lopez, a 45-year-old taxi driver, who recovered the bodies of two daughters and a grandson.
“But I would like to find the mother of my daughters,” he said inside a small Evangelical church near Santa Catarina Pinula.
Authorities said on Sunday they had so far recovered 131 bodies in the town on the southeastern flank of Guatemala City.
Heavy rains sent earth and rock cascading over homes and trapping residents inside on Thursday night. No survivors have been found this weekend despite the efforts of around 1,800 rescue workers sifting through the rubble.
Rain hampered search and rescue efforts yesterday.
In the town’s crowded cemetery, families sobbed as they placed wreaths on hastily-sealed tombs stacked in walls, where simple inscriptions in cement listed the names of the dead.
Reginaldo Gomez buried his grandson Andres in one of the tombs and asked that a space be set aside nearby for the boy’s mother and sister, still missing among the mounds of earth and shattered homes littering the valley floor at Santa Catarina.
Along with his wife Angela, Gomez had earlier yesterday mourned the 4-year-old boy, garlanded with flowers in a small coffin lined with satin, at a modest home in Guatemala City.