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Introducing her book
"I am my father's daughter"
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| BURIED ALIVE IN GUATEMALA |
| Written by Maria Elena Salinas |
| Monday, October 24 2005 |
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| BURIED ALIVE IN GUATEMALA
BY MARIA ELENA SALINAS
TACANA, San Pedro, Guatemala -- The next worst thing to losing a loved one is not being able to say your good-byes, to provide a decent burial for him, to have closure. That happens in the most unfortunate cases of plane crashes or the disappearance of family members. But knowing that your mother or father, son or daughter, wife, husband, uncle or grandparent is buried under tons of mud and being unable to dig him or her out has got to be one of the most painful ordeals a human being has to confront.
Such is the case for hundreds or maybe even thousands of Guatemalans whose loved ones were victims of deadly mudslides in several parts of the country -- mostly poor neighborhoods with shabby construction.
Of all the areas affected by the storms that hit this Central American country in the wake of Hurricane Stan, the most remote and hardest to reach is Tacana, about 12 miles from the Mexican border. The rising rivers tore down bridges, making it almost impossible for help to reach by land. The continuous bad weather made it dangerous to get there by air.
When the skies cleared, I traveled to Tacana the only way I could -- by helicopter with the Guatemalan military. Several villages there were swept away by mudslides, the most devastating in the township of Cua, a tranquil community on a plain where victims of the storm had come to take refuge.
Dozens were sheltered in two churches, one Catholic and the other Protestant. On the afternoon of Thursday, Oct. 6, while children played, women cooked and men worked, the hill behind them came tumbling down, wiping out dozens of houses, businesses, a school and the two churches.
Miraculously, the Catholic church had been evacuated the night before, but at the Church of the Seventh Day, there were several dozen people praying at the time of the disaster. Mauricio Merida, a volunteer fireman, arrived a few minutes later. He was able to save three people, but only one of those survived. "A little boy yelled, 'Hurry, hurry,'" he told me. "He was completely unscathed, but I am still haunted by his screaming. I think if we had taken a little time to attend to his mother and little sister, we could have saved them, too." The only family member the little boy had left was his father, who had gone to the United States to work 20 days earlier.
Pantaleon Escalante Perez was working on a farm in Central Florida when he found out about the mudslide in his hometown of Cua. His entire family lived there. He immediately made plans to go there, but he arrived too late. Not only was his house gone, but his wife and six of his seven children were dead. He could not even enter the area, let alone attempt to dig for their bodies.
In total, 19 bodies were recovered from the rubble; the rest were buried alive. According to Sergio Morales, Guatemala's human-rights prosecutor, lives could have been saved if the government had not abruptly cordoned off the area and stopped the digging less than 48 hours after the mudslides. "There were voices heard coming from a nearby home, and two days later those voices were silenced," he said.
The authorities blame the health risk of decomposing bodies for their decision. But people like Merida, the volunteer fireman who worked in the rescue effort, say that one more day of digging would have allowed them to recover more bodies. "We should have given those people who were begging to recover their loved ones the satisfaction of giving them a Christian burial," he said.
In the meantime, those who survived the mudslides and flooding but lost everything they owned to the storms are in temporary shelters, with no place to go or funds to rebuild. The human-rights prosecutor is right when he says, "To talk about rebuilding Guatemala, and think that Guatemala is only roads and structures, is a mistake; the reconstruction begins by rebuilding lives." |
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