By LARRY ROHTER
MIAMI -- Intense
and widespread flooding in the wake of Hurricane Mitch has killed more
than 1,000 people
in Central America, with hundreds more still missing, their villages buried
under huge mudslides,
relief and government officials said Sunday.
In northwestern
Nicaragua, more than 360 bodies entombed overnight by one such avalanche
were
recovered during
the day from settlements at the foot of the Casita Volcano, near Posoltega,
about
45 miles northwest
of Managua, the capital.
Continuing rainfall
and extensive damage to roads and bridges hampered relief efforts all over
Nicaragua and
Honduras, the countries most severely affected by the powerful late-season
storm.
Some residents
were evacuated from the area around Posoltega when rivers began rising
late last
week, but officials
said they expected the death toll in the area to rise.
"Some communities
were completely destroyed," said Leonora Rivera, a spokeswoman for the
Nicaraguan Red
Cross. "The number of dead will increase considerably once it stops raining
and we
can get into
isolated areas," she added.
Sunday night,
Nicaragua's Minister of Defense, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro Barrios, said,
"Between
1,000 and 1,500
may have died" when mudslides on the slopes of the volcano came crashing
down
on peasant villages
at the bottom. "We are dealing with a national tragedy, which all of Nicaragua
is
mourning."
Farther south,
areas east of Managua have been inundated by rampaging flood waters, driving
thousands from
their homes. Lake Managua and Lake Nicaragua, normally separated by a narrow
strip of land,
have risen so much and so rapidly that they have merged, leaving the town
of Tipitapa
and sections
of the Pan-American Highway under several feet of water.
"Not just this
country, but all of Central America is cut off," President Arnoldo Aleman
of Nicaragua
said in a televised
address in which he urged vulnerable people to seek shelter on high ground.
His
Honduran counterpart,
Carlos Flores, found himself trapped in San Pedro Sula, an industrial city
of
500,000 people,
cut off from the capital by flooding.
Officials in
both countries said they were having difficulties obtaining reliable death
counts from
affected zones.
Normal communications have been severed, and many residents have fled to
other
areas on their
own, leading Juan Navarro, a spokesman for Aleman, to caution that "there
is a lot of
anarchy" in
the estimates being reported in local press accounts.
"We cannot yet
specify with certainty the magnitude of the disaster and the number of
dead," Aleman
said before
declaring three days of national mourning Sunday night in remembrance of
what he
would only estimate
as "hundreds" of fatalities. "But I believe that since the earthquake of
1972, we
have not suffered
so much loss of human life as the misfortune experienced in recent days."
The
quake destroyed
much of Managua and killed as many as 5,000 people.
With sustained
winds of up to 180 mph at its peak, Mitch was by far the strongest storm
of the 1998
hurricane season.
But the bulk of the damage has occurred as it diminished in recent days
from a
rare Category
5 storm, the most severe on the Saffir-Simpson scale, to a tropical depression
stalled
over the Gulf
of Honduras.
For several days,
a strong front over the Gulf of Mexico prevented the storm from pushing
northward, thereby
sparing Cancun and the Yucatan Peninsula, which had been directly in the
storm's original
path. As a result, heavy rains have fallen ceaselessly for nearly a week
not just in
Honduras and
Nicaragua, but throughout Guatemala and El Salvador, both of which have
also
declared states
of national emergency, and in Belize.
In some parts
of Central America, rainfall exceeding two feet was recorded in a single
24-hour
period. With
rivers already overflowing in several nations, the National Hurricane Center
here on
Sunday was predicting
up to 10 more inches of rain for the northern half of Central America,
which
was sure to
worsen the crisis. A spokesman said Sunday night that the situation was
too chaotic to
estimate rainfall
for Monday, adding that the center expected the rains to ease considerably
overnight.
In Tegucigalpa,
capital of Honduras and home to nearly a million people, the raging waters
of the
Choluteca River
swept away entire neighborhoods over the weekend, as well as cars, trucks,
trees,
power lines
and livestock. More than 130 people were reported to have drowned, and
as residents
fled or sought
safety on roofs, police reported that looters were raiding stores and homes.
"The capital
has been leveled," Mayor Cesar Castellanos said. "Blocks and blocks of
middle-class
and poor neighborhoods,
shops -- they have all been completely demolished."
Later Sunday,
Castellanos and three other people were reported to have been killed when
their
helicopter crashed
during a flight to inspect damage and repair efforts.
In Guatemala,
a light plane, said by local officials in the province of Quetzaltenango
to be the
property of
an American missionary group, also crashed in heavy rain, and a dozen passengers
were
reported killed.
The lightly populated
Bay Islands, a favorite haunt of divers about 30 miles off the northern
coast of
Honduras, appear
to have been especially hard hit. Over the weekend, a television crew flew
over
the islands
of Guanuja and Roatan, isolated from the mainland for nearly a week, and
filmed scenes
of devastation:
houses, hotels and palm trees flattened and boats strewn about like toys.
"The forces of
nature are hammering us in every inch of national territory," said the
commander of the
Honduran Armed
Forces, Gen. Mario Hung Pacheco.
Gen. Rodolfo
Pacheco, chief of the Honduran Air Force, said: "This is a catastrophe
beyond
measure. It's
incredible. The entire nation is in danger."
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company