‘The Bodies Are Decomposing’ After a Mudslide in Colombia
Mr. Estrella said that Now the bodies are decomposing because they are in open air,
"There’s not a single drop of drinkable water — we need water, that’s what’s urgent —
and there’s nothing to eat," Marisol González, the head of a nearby technological institute, told the newspaper El Tiempo.
"But the water caught up to them in the street, and my mother let go of his hand." Mr.
Santos has promised to pour state resources into staging a full recovery for the city.
The bodies were piling up on Monday morning in Mocoa, a Colombian city where mud
and debris had made it impossible in places to see that anyone had ever lived there.
Mr. Piaguaje, the radio journalist, said there were so many bodies that there was no one to bury them all.
And family members, like Mr. Estrella, pleaded for the bodies of loved ones so they could offer them a proper burial.
Rescue teams, some covered in mud, waded through a landscape of stone
and earth in what in many cases had become a search for bodies rather than survivors.
"To their families we send condolences and the sympathy of the entire country."
Many residents of the city remained without electricity, water or gasoline.
Nixon Piaguaje said that The putrefaction is beginning,