Guatemala Landslide Kills 33, More Missing
Date: 06-Jan-09
Country: GUATEMALA
Author: Sarah Grainger
GUATEMALA CITY, Jan 5 - At least 33 people were killed and up to 60 were missing after a huge chunk of mountain collapsed onto coffee farmworkers walking home along a road in northern Guatemala on Sunday, officials said.
Hugo Arvizu, a spokesman for disaster relief commission CONRED, told Reuters on Monday the death count had risen to 33 from 22 the previous day and rescue workers were still battling to dig some of those bodies out of the rubble.
Arvizu said reports from villagers in the area, close to the small indigenous town of San Cristobal Verapaz, suggested as many as 60 other people being missing.
The massive landslide, triggered by a geological fault, brought some 10 million tonnes of rock crashing down onto the road in a sparsely populated area of Alta Verapaz department, around 124 miles (200 km) north of Guatemala City.
The victims were laborers returning home from coffee farms in a nearby department who apparently ignored warnings not to use the road, which was closed in December after a smaller rockfall killed two people.
The mayor of San Cristobal Verapaz, Leopoldo Ical, told Reuters around 80 farmworkers had been traveling in two trucks when they reached the closed road near the hamlet of Los Chorros and continued on foot.
"The trucks stopped and the workers got out and continued on foot. They are the dead and disappeared," Ical said.
Guatemalan Vice President Rafael Espada said on Sunday that continued rockfalls in the area were hampering rescue efforts.
Landslides are common in Guatemala, but usually occur during the rainy season between June and November when hills become waterlogged and unstable.
The lush hillsides of Alta Verapaz department are prime areas for growing coffee and cardamom but a geological fault in the limestone rock formations cuts straight through the area. (Editing by Eric Walsh)
