MEXICO CITY — A hillside collapsed on hundreds of sleeping residents Tuesday in a rural Mexican community drenched for days by two major storms, killing at least seven and leaving at least 100 missing, disaster officials said.
The death toll could rise much higher in Santa Maria Tlahuitoltepec, a town about 130 miles southeast of Mexico City. Oaxaca state Civil Protection operations coordinator Luis Marin said 100 people were confirmed missing, but Oaxaca Gov. Ulises Ruiz told the Televisa television network 500 to 1,000 people could be buried.
At least 100 homes were buried, and residents who made it out have had no success in digging out their neighbors, said Donato Vargas, an official in Santa Maria de Tlahuitoltepec reached by a satellite telephone.
“We have been using a backhoe but there is a lot of mud. We can’t even see the homes, we can’t hear shouts, we can’t hear anything,” he said.
An eighth person was killed in another mudslide in the state of Oaxaca. Weeks of heavy rains, including those brought by Hurricane Karl and Tropical Storm Matthew, have caused havoc and dozens of other deaths in southern Mexico, Central America and parts of South America.
Vargas said the slide dragged houses packed with sleeping families some 1,300 feet downhill, along with cars, livestock and light poles.
Huge swaths of riverside communities in southern Mexico were still under water Tuesday — flooding exacerbated by the passage of Karl and Matthew. Before the landslide, at least 15 deaths in Mexico were blamed on the hurricane.
Read tomorrow's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.
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