05
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2005
WORLD
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN 7A
WEATHER
Hurricane spawns massive rainstorms
BY DIEGO MENDEZ
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — Heavy rains pounded Central America for a fourth day Wednesday, pushing rivers over their banks, flooding communities and unleashing at least two deadly mudslides as the region's death toll surpassed 120.
Hurricane Stan, which had helped spawn rainstorms in Central America, weakened to a depression over the southern state of Oaxaca on Wednesday, a day after making landfall along Mexico's Gulf coast. But punishing rains continued in parts of Central America and southern Mexico.
In Guatemala, a mudslide near the internationally popular tourist destination of Lake Atitlan, about 60 miles west of the capital, Guatemala City,
buried several houses. It was not clear how many people were caught in the earth and debris, said Carlos Santizo, chief of the Solola volunteer fire department.
An Associated Press photographer on site said he saw at least 12 bodies recovered, bringing the death toll in Guatemala alone to at least 50, and the total number of confirmed victims to more than 120 throughout the region.
Flooding in scores of Guatemalan communities forced the evacuation of more than 6,000 residents. Nearly all of the country's rivers overflowed, while landslides and fallen trees blocked at least 30 roadways. Most of the victims were killed in landslides, national disaster agency officials said.
Guatemalaan President Oscar Berger called on Congress to declare a national state of
emergency, allowing the government to force evacuations of dangerous areas, set prices on emergency supplies and provide federal coordination of relief efforts.
"But we're only going to do all of this if it is absolutely necessary." Berger said.
In the Salvadoran capital, San Salvador, at least 50 people were killed by four days of mudslides and flooding. More than 16,700 Salvadorans had fled their homes for 167 shelters nationwide.
Among those evacuated were residents of Santa Tecla, outside the capital, San Salvador, where a strong earthquake caused a massive landslide in January 2001. Officials have worried the mountain running alongside the neighborhood might collapse again with heavy rains or another quake.
Nine people died in storm-
Moises Castillo/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Inhabitants of Chimaltenango, Guatemala, 38 miles west of Guatemala City, stand in front of their destroyed house Wednesday. According to Guatemala's National Disaster Emergency Agency, 2,200 evacuees in the affected areas were receiving refuge in community shelters.
related storms in Nicaragua, including six migrants believed to be Ecuadoreans killed in a boat wreck. Four deaths were reported in Honduras and one in Costa Rica.
In the Chiapas city of Tapachula, near Mexico's border with Guatemala, three people were killed when an overflowing river roared through the city, also carrying homes of
wood and metal, civil protection officials said Wednesday. Three other Chiapas residents were confirmed dead, as flooding forced hundreds of evacuations.
▼ CATHOLIC CHURCH
Bishop: organized crime donations acceptable, welcomed
BY LISA J. ADAMS THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
MEXICO CITY — When a Mexican bishop declared that drug traffickers often donate to the church, shock waves ran through this predominantly Roman Catholic nation — not because the news was a surprise, but because admitting it was tantamount to confessing that nothing, not even God, is sacred when it comes to organized crime in Mexico.
Provoking the uproar were Bishop Ramon Godinez's comments to reporters that donations from drug traffickers are not unusual and it's not the
church's responsibility to investigate. He argued that the money is "purified" once it passes through parish doors.
"Just because the origin of the money is bad doesn't mean you have to burn it," Godinez, of the central state of Aguascalientes, said last month. "Instead, you have to transform it. ... We live on this, on the offerings of the faithful."
Organized crime, especially drug trafficking, and the threat it poses to public safety are among Mexicans' highest concerns. And it's not just the criminals they worry about. They also distrust the public agencies responsible for tackling crime
prosecutors, police, the judicial system and politicians.
The church, on the other hand, is still held in high esteem.
"Of all the institutions in Mexico, the church is ranked No. 1 in terms of people's confidence," said Roderic Al Camp, an expert on Mexican religion at Claremont-McKenna College in California. It is "the one institution they find morally superior and basically honest and serving the interests of the average Mexican."
That trust holds steady even though it is common knowledge that "many towns and chapels in Mexico have been remodeled and restored thanks to the generous contributions of people who work in drug trafficking," Mexican religion expert Roberto Blancarte wrote in the Milenio newspaper.
Especially in poor, outlying rural areas, drug traffickers have taken on a kind of "Robin Hood" role, Blancarte said.
"It's not official, but it's probably fairly accepted," Camp added. "You don't want to legitimize it ... because it's such a contradiction to the church's whole philosophy. People are looking to the church for moral leadership."
The Vatican had no comment on the matter Wednesday. But a Vatican official noted that the
church has general principals based on the Bible which would prevent it from receiving the "fruit of an injustice."
For more than 300 years after the Spanish conquest of 1521, the Catholic Church was at the heart of Mexican power socially, politically and economically. Although the mid-19th-century Laws of the Reform put an end to that dominance, the country has remained — at least nominally — 90 percent Catholic.
"There are many ... who want to scare us with the idea" that the church once again could become an all-powerful presence, said Jaime
Septien Crespo, editor of the Catholic weekly newspaper Observador in the central state of Queretaro. "There is an interest in discrediting this presence, so when a minister of the church says something clumsy, he becomes an easy target."
As next year's presidential election race heats up, the scandal has been exaggerated by political parties "looking to destroy potential alliances, in this case an alliance of the National Action Party and the church," Crespo said, referring to the alleged links between President Vicente Fox's conservative party and the clergy.