GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) – Guatemala has halted rescue operations in a storm-ravaged village where many other people probably died last week on a large landslide, the country’s national crisis firm said Tuesday, adding that the site is no longer habitable and would be abandoned.
The torrential rains of Storm Eta knocked down trees, obstructed fast rivers and broke portions of a mountain over the village of Queja in Guatemala’s central Alta Verapaz region last week.
Ovid Choc, mayor of San Cristobal Verapaz, a municipality to which Queja belongs, said that the domain would be declared a cemetery and that the bodies would not be discovered there.
“Communities can’t come back because the position is habitable,” Shock said.
Earlier in the day, CONRED crisis firm spokesman David de León said the search for the frame had been suspended because the ground was dangerous for excavation teams. The region has suffered several landslides since Thursday’s crisis.
While President Alejandro Giammattei had first said that up to 150 others could have been buried in the landslide of Complaint, CONRED’s own figures show 8 deaths in Complaint and another 88 without others in the village.
Alberto Ical, a network official in Queja, about two hundred kilometers north of the capital, said the villagers sought to continue the search because the local tradition is to practice the bodies of deceased relatives before burying them.
“What we need is to keep looking and be able to locate everyone, even if we know it may not be possible,” he added.
Nationally, it showed the death toll of Eta 44 and there were 99 people missing in Guatemala, according to CONRED figures.
The devastating climate front caused through Eta one of the worst storms that hit Central America in years, spilling destruction from Panama to Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Mexico.
(Reporting through Sofia Menchu; written through Drazen Jorgic; edited through Frank Jack Daniel, Aurora Ellis and David Gregorio)
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