RESCUE workers in Guatemala were close to abandoning their search for bodies last night and declaring the area where an entire Mayan community lived a mass grave, as the feared death toll from mudslides rose to 1,500.

The village of Panabaj was buried whole when the side of a volcano collapsed after days of torrential rain from Hurricane Stan, sending millions of tonnes of mud, rocks and debris thundering on to homes built of wood and tin as their occupants slept.

The national newspaper, La Hora, described “Dante-esque scenes, total grief” as volunteers excavated dozens of children’s corpses, wrapped them in banana leaves or plastic bags and laid them to rest in hastily buried coffins without ceremony — some without names. Workers packed their nostrils with sprigs of herbs to mask the stench of death.

But with the 40ft-deep mud slick beginning to bake hard and the 72-hour legal deadline for retrieving the dead having expired, the authorities were urging volunteers who have dug for days using their bare hands and simple farm tools to give up their efforts. “We’re more concerned with getting food to the people who are alive,” said Ana Luisa Olmedo, a spokeswoman for the Guatemalan civil protection agency.

An estimated 100,000 people in more than 400 Guatemalan communities were affected by the storm, which made landfall in Mexico last week and then swept across the Central American peninsula. More than 100 others were reported dead in flash floods in Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Costa Rica.

The worst hit were the town of Santiago Atitlán and surrounding villages such as Panabaj, in Guatemala’s western highlands, where 95 per cent of the population are indigenous Tzutujil Mayans. The area on the shores of Lake Atitlán is popular with tourists, some of whom helped villagers to search for corpses.

Guatemalan law dictates that, for health reasons, there is a three-day limit on finding the dead after natural disasters. But many seemed determined to continue. “That’s people’s families under there,” said Chris Needham, 24, from London. “They’re not going to stop digging. I wouldn’t stop.”

Diego Sojuel, of the Santiago Atitlán municipal aid committee, said: “Entire families have disappeared. In some cases there is no one that can identify the cadavers. In other cases, because of the state of decomposition, we are going to have to bury them without names.” Survivors sat atop the mud, holding sodden photographs of people missing in the quagmire below.

Some clutched lists of missing relatives, crossing off the names one by one after hauling their corpses from the congealed avalanche. “That’s my wife, my two daughters, my son — I’m only missing one more son,” Gaspar Taxachoy Tzina, a taxi driver, said as he buried his three-year-old daughter, Mari. He returned from work to find his home gone. “You always think about saving your family, but I couldn’t.”

Some described how they realised that the rivers were rising during the storm, but went back to sleep once the rain had eased off, unaware that disaster was about to engulf them.

“It was a roar, it was like an earthquake,” Martín Ramírez Tacaxoy, a 41-year-old farmer, said. He rescued three of his neighbours from the mudslide after they became buried up to their necks. “Some people on the edges were able to grab hold of coffee trees and we pulled them out. But many remained underneath.”

President Berger gave warning of more bad news to come. More than a hundred communities remained cut off by floods and blocked roads after rivers as narrow as six feet swelled into raging, 50ft-wide torrents. Food and water were said to be running short in some remote regions, poor weather was hampering rescue efforts and the authorities remained unable to establish the death toll yesterday.

The President said: “I believe that we will be badly surprised by the consequences of this disaster.”

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