Up to 50 missing in Bolivia mudslide - officials

31 Mar 2003 23:55:00 GMT

LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) - Up to 50 Bolivians were believed missing on Monday when a landslide engulfed dozens of homes in a remote northern gold-prospecting town, officials said.

La Paz province security officials scaled back initial reports that as many as 700 people had been buried, saying they believed 40 to 50 people were missing as heavy rains washed away a mountainside. They refuted media reports four people had been confirmed dead.

A local radio journalist who reached a nearby town said he was told by inhabitants 150 people were unaccounted for.

The remote site of Chima, 360 miles (580 km) north of the capital, La Paz, by winding road, was expected to take rescuers 10 hours to reach, and officials said conflicting reports and poor communications meant the toll of the missing could change.

"The first reports we received were exaggerated," Oscar Nina, La Paz province security chief said, adding he had been told 150 houses had been buried and up to 50 people were missing.

About 1,200 families live in the town beneath Chima mountain, where mining cooperatives prospect for gold with rudimentary equipment, desperate to escape poverty that envelops 60 percent of the country's 8 million people.

Hundreds of people have been killed by landslides in the gold-rich north near the borders with Peru and Brazil over the past decade where miners in one of the Western Hemisphere's poorest countries pan for gold using century-old technology.

Sixty people were killed by a mudslide in the jungle gold-mining town of Mocotoro in 1998, while a mountain slide was estimated to have killed hundreds of people in 1992 in Llipi.

Thousands of people were killed by mudslides in Venezuela in 1999 on the mountainous northern coast near Caracas, following torrential rains.