Hopes Dim for Those Missing in Central America Storm

Ariela Amador waited all afternoon, watching hopefully as rescue helicopters landed in a field near her home. Orlando Vargas hiked 60 miles, wading through rivers. Tomas Mayorga journeyed for two days, first by bus, then on foot.

All three were searching desperately for loved ones missing in the most destructive mudslide unleashed by tropical storm Mitch. Each found at least one relative alive. But about 1,000 people remain unaccounted for in the mudslide at Casitas Volcano in western Nicaragua. They are among the nearly 12,000 still missing in the worst-hit countries of Central America.

By Saturday, as Health Ministry brigades moved among the ruins of hamlets and through fields burning and burying bodies--some dragged 20 miles by a raging river of mud--to prevent epidemics, it was clear that many who disappeared during the past two weeks will never be found.

In the Casitas Volcano mudslide alone, more than 500 bodies have been burned or buried unidentified, and health officials said they are receiving more reports of bodies that have yet to be tended to.

In all, 1,287 people were still missing in Nicaragua and 10,109 in Honduras. Salvadoran officials listed 20 missing--most in a smaller mudslide there--although local officials in the eastern township of San Miguel said 77 people had disappeared there.

Throughout Central America, the search for missing relatives continues in hospitals, refugee centers and over the airwaves.

Mercedes Martinez and Justo Estrella are frantic for word about 18-year-old Noel, the third of their six children. Since Estrella lost his job as a mechanic three years ago, the family has survived by selling mattresses and mosquito nets from their home in Tipitapa, Nicaragua, an area that was among the hardest hit by flooding.

Noel left home Oct. 26, headed to Quilali, near the Honduran border, to sell mattresses and has not been heard from since. “We know that the river there overflowed its banks and the town was destroyed,” said Lorena Villarreal, a family friend who is helping with the search by placing newspaper advertisements and answering telephone calls.

For those who have been able to search on their own, the results have been a mixture of relief and grief.

Tomas Mayorga was at a construction job in Costa Rica when a friend told him of the disaster in his hometown of Rolando Rodriguez, Nicaragua. Rain had burst the sides of a volcano that had a crater lake, sending a wall of mud crashing down on the village where Mayorga’s wife, four children and parents lived.

Mayorga left right away that Monday morning, reaching the city of Leon that night. Along the way, he picked up a newspaper. “Imagine how I felt, seeing a picture of my son, covered with blood,” he said.

The photo showed that 10-year-old Tomas had survived. But Mayorga had to walk 60 miles over a road closed by collapsed bridges and mud and rock slides from Leon to Chinandega to learn that 13-year-old Anielka also was alive; no other family members survived.

“I promised them that I will never leave them again,” he said, sitting with Anielka at the Hospital Espanol, where she is being treated for scrapes.

Orlando Vargas, who moved to Leon two years ago from Rolando Rodriguez, had hiked the same route last Monday, when the road was still covered in water. He stood in the crowd outside the hospital as a doctor read a list of survivors admitted to the hospital.

The only two from his family of eight siblings and their children who remain: his brother Carlos and 2-year-old niece Yuelka. “It is a hard blow to lose your loved ones, parents, brothers and sisters, all at once,” he said.

Claudia Nunez, 13, was talking with her parents and brothers outside their home in Rolando Rodriguez when the mud swept them away Oct. 30. She lay covered in mud up to her neck until a helicopter rescued her two days later.

On the afternoon of the rescue, her cousin, Ariela Amador, and a family friend, Rosa Maria Ortiz, had stood waiting in a field where helicopters were landing. They were almost sure that no one they knew had survived.

Then, the fourth and last flight landed, and they saw Claudia and her father, Juan Alberto Nunez, carried off. Ortiz cried. “We thought we had lost everyone,” Amador said. “Only two are left of 32” family members who lived in the village.