Bolivia says mudslide kills 14, 200 said missing

NEWSDESK 01 Apr 2003 18:56:05 GMT

LA PAZ, Bolivia, April 1 (Reuters) - Heavy rains triggered a massive landslide in a remote gold-prospecting town in northern Bolivia, killing at least 14 people and leaving 200 missing, officials said on Tuesday.

A mountainside washed into the town of Chima, 117 miles (190 km) from the capital of La Paz, on Monday, burying more than 100 houses in mud.

"Fourteen bodies have been found so far," government health official Beatriz Peinado told Reuters.

Peinado said the first of a convoy of rescuers had arrived in the town, accessible only by a winding 360 mile (580 km) road, after a 10-hour journey. The area was declared a disaster zone by President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.

Government officials said the U.S. Embassy lent rescue teams, four helicopters and an airplane that are usually used in efforts to eradicate illegal crops of coca, the plant used to make cocaine, to aid rescue efforts. But bad weather was hampering air travel to the area.

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 about 60 percent of the country's 8 million people.

Monday's mudslide was the latest in a series of similar disasters that have killed hundreds of people over the last decade in the gold-rich north near the border with Peru and Brazil, 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 in 1992 in Llipi.

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