Guatemala declares mudslide-hit community ‘uninhabitable’

Guatemalan officials weighed what to do with the site of a massive, acres-wide mudslide that might still hold hundreds of bodies and a surrounding area of largely untouched homes that has been declared uninhabitable. Simply too vast to excavate fully, there may come a point — as in the past — where officials simply end digging efforts at the site and declare the area where the unrecovered bodies lie a de-facto graveyard, their buried houses becoming their final tombs.

They told us they have to get organized, they have to buy land. Also that they’re getting money together to buy us homes, but nothing concrete.

Clara Elena Solorzano, 40, who had lived in the neighborhood for 17 years in a house built by her husband.

Officials are also considering what to do with residents of the Cambray community on the outskirts of Guatemala City whose houses escaped Thursday’s massive landslide but whose neighborhood has now been declared uninhabitable by Guatemala’s National Disaster Reduction Commission, known as the Conred. As the death toll rose to 152 late Monday, questions mounted about why people were allowed to build homes at the base of a dangerous hillside next to a small river. Conred said it had warned of the risk Cambray faced since last year and had recommended that residents be relocated.

If we had been warned of the danger we were running we never would have bought. We practically bought our own tomb.

Sonia Hernandez, who had 10 family members displaced by the landslide.

World mudslide