Dozens still missing four days after Venezuela landslide

Thousands of rescuers and residents were engaged in an increasingly desperate search through thick mud Wednesday for 56 people still missing after a devastating landslide swept through a Venezuelan town, killing dozens.

At the last official count, 43 bodies had been found after disaster struck Las Tejerias, a town of some 50,000 people nestled in the mountains about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the capital Caracas, on Saturday.

President Nicolas Maduro said Tuesday the toll from Venezuela's worst natural disaster in decades was likely to reach 100.

Unusually heavy rains caused a major river and several streams to overflow, creating a torrent of mud that washed away cars, parts of homes, businesses and telephone wires, and felled massive trees.

"This is no longer Las Tejerias. It is a disaster," 60-year-old housewife Maria Romero, who had clung to a tree trunk stuck between two walls to avoid being swept away, told AFP Wednesday.

Romero and six family members found temporary shelter at a primary school that survived the deluge. She lost everything and, like hundreds of others, is uncertain about the future.

The search for the missing continued, with emergency personnel using pickaxes, shovels and chainsaws to break through the hardening mud now covering the town.

The military dropped food parcels and water with parachutes from a helicopter in isolated areas, as a mass cleanup was under way to clear trees, rocks, cars, street lamps and electric poles piled up among thick mud layers in the roads.

Water and electricity had been partially restored.

- 'Only in the movies' -

"I had never seen a river so big, only in the movies," Romero said as she recounted how her husband had saved their children one by one from their flooded home, and then came back for the adults.

She herself was paralyzed by panic.

"My granddaughter screamed... 'Neighbors, save us!' but how could the neighbors save us if they had it worse than us?" said Romero.

Vice President Delcy Rodriguez has said that a month's worth of rain fell in the area in just eight hours.

The government declared three days of mourning.

Already on Tuesday, rescuers told AFP it would be difficult to find any survivors. 

Gabriel Castillo, 32, ran through the village in tears, desperate for news on his mother, his partner and a cousin with whom he had shared a house on the banks of a stream that overflowed.

He did not find their names on a survivors' list at a nearby hospital.

At the hospital, "they offered me food, but I don't want food, what I want is for my family to reappear," he told AFP.

Experts say the storm was aggravated by the seasonal La Nina weather phenomenon gripping the region, as well as the effects of Hurricane Julia, which claimed at least 26 lives in Central America and caused extensive damage.

Crisis-hit Venezuela is no stranger to seasonal storms, but this was the worst so far this year following historic rain levels that caused dozens of other deaths in recent months. 

Maduro has vowed to rebuild "each and every" home and business destroyed in the landslide.

"Las Tejerias will rise like the phoenix, Las Tejerias will be reborn," he said.

According to Rodriguez, 317 homes were destroyed and 757 damaged by the mudslide. 

In 1999, about 10,000 people died in a massive landslide in the northern state of Vargas. 

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© Agence France-Presse

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