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Guatemala's Maya Indians hit hard in new tragedy
11 Oct 2005 21:14:40 GMT
Source: Reuters
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U.S. army soldiers stand near military helicopters with relief supplies bound for flood victims at an airport in Guatemala City October 11, 2005. Maya Indian villagers gave up hope on Monday of finding up to 1,400 victims buried in a huge mudslide in Guatemala even as sniffer dogs led a final, almost certainly futile search for miracle survivors.
REUTERS/DANIEL AGUILAR
U.S. army soldiers stand near military helicopters with relief supplies bound for flood victims at an airport in Guatemala City October 11, 2005. Maya Indian villagers gave up hope on Monday of finding up to 1,400 victims buried in a huge mudslide in Guatemala even as sniffer dogs led a final, almost certainly futile search for miracle survivors.
REUTERS/DANIEL AGUILAR
A local volunteer unloads food aid from a U.S. Army helicopter to a truck during a humanitarian delivery in Concepcion Tutuapa, Guatemala October 11, 2005. Maya Indian villagers gave up hope on Monday of finding up to 1,400 victims buried in a huge mudslide in Guatemala even as sniffer dogs led a final, almost certainly futile search for miracle survivors.
REUTERS/DANIEL AGUILAR
A Maya Indian mother with her son walk near a U.S. Army Chinook helicopter during a humanitarian delivery in Concepcion Tutuapa, Guatemala October 11, 2005. Maya Indian villagers gave up hope on Monday of finding up to 1,400 victims buried in a huge mudslide in Guatemala even as sniffer dogs led a final, almost certainly futile search for miracle survivors.
REUTERS/DANIEL AGUILAR
(Updates with details, quotes from president, villagers) By Catherine Bremer TACANA, Guatemala, Oct 11 (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. It was a similar story in other villages hit by mudslides across Guatemala. The official death toll of rains from Hurricane Stan sits at 652 and 398 disappeared but emergency workers say the real number is in the range of 2,000. More than 100 others were killed in neighboring countries and tens of thousands lost their homes across Central America and southern Mexico. In Cua, volunteers sprayed the disaster area with disinfectant and lime while residents took refuge in shelters higher up in these remote mountains near the Mexican border. Ragged clothing, bits of plastic, a cabbage and an umbrella lay scattered in the muck. The hamlet was almost empty, but for abandoned dogs, chickens and a black pig. 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. "THE SAME BLOOD" 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. They are isolated and discriminated against, often seen as little more than house-servants to the country's non-Indians. When natural disasters hit, they invariably do most damage to Mayan areas where people settle in flimsy homes by rivers and on mountain slopes. When Stan's rains battered the country, rescue teams and supplies of food and medicines took days to arrive. President Oscar Berger flew on Tuesday to the village of Panabaj where up to 1,400 people died in the biggest single tragedy of the last week. Accompanied by Indian rights activist and Nobel peace prize winner Rigoberta Menchu, who has joined his conservative government, Berger promised to build temporary shelters for the homeless and land for them to resettle on. Menchu held a paper mask over her mouth against the stench, and wept as she picked her way through the rubble and remains of homes at the edge of the devastated village. Thousand of locals turned out to see the president but some complained about his government's slow response. "It's very late, a week has already passed, He should have come earlier," said Salvador Ramirez, a local craftsman. (Additional reporting by Frank Jack Daniel and Eduardo Garcia)
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