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 <g data-gr-id="14">vast</g> 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. 

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 <g data-gr-id="15">Conred</g>. “They told us they have to get organized, they have to buy land” for us, said Clara Elena Solorzano, 40, who had lived in the neighborhood for 17 years in a house built by her husband. “Also that they’re getting <g data-gr-id="16">money</g> together to buy us homes, but nothing concrete.”