| | |  News Around the Republic of Mexico 
Mexico, Central America Struggle Through Deadly Rainy Season
 Daniel Hernandez - Los Angeles Times
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September 09, 2010
| | A woman wades with her child down a flooded street in Villahermosa. About 600,000 have been displaced in southeastern Mexico. (Gilberto Villasana/AFP/Getty Images) | |
In Mexico, 600,000 have been displaced by flooding in five southeastern states. The search for 15 still missing in a Guatemala mudslide is called off because of the risk.
Mexico City — Heavy rainfall has set off deadly mudslides and widespread flooding across Central America and Mexico's southeast, killing more than 50 people and displacing more than half a million.
In Guatemala, rescuers citing the possibility of more slides called off the search for 15 people who remained missing after a highway mudslide Sunday killed 45.
In Mexico, the Red Cross said more than 600,000 have been displaced in five states as several rivers flooded towns and villages, mostly in the states of Veracruz and Tabasco. Seven people have reportedly died.
Many residents of the affected regions are refusing to leave their homes.
"This has been an extraordinarily different and extraordinarily rainier year than any other," President Felipe Calderon said this week while visiting Tabasco's flood-threatened capital, Villahermosa. Calderon said recent anti-flooding measures have helped but that "more must be done."
Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom declared a state of emergency and a period of national mourning, saying that in "102 days of aggression from climate change," 253 Guatemalans have died and hundreds of thousands have been displaced.
Guatemala was still recovering from Tropical Storm Agatha, which killed 165 people in May. The current rainy season has been called the heaviest in the country in 60 years.
Deaths related to heavy rainfall this season have also been reported in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua.
Guatemala's government said festivities celebrating independence on Wednesday, particulary traditional torch processions along highways, would be canceled or muted because of the mudslide.
Hernandez is a staff writer in The Times' Mexico City Bureau.
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