Salvadoran Town Hit by Landslide Buries Dead

Salvadorans look at their houses that were damaged by heavy rains in San Salvador November 8, 2009. ...

Salvadorans look at their houses that were damaged by heavy rains in San Salvador November 8, 2009. At least 54 people are dead in El Salvador following flooding and mudslides triggered by Hurricane Ida, a spokesman for the interior ministry said on Sunday in a statement read on local radio.

(William Bonilla /Reuters)

Tears streamed down Elsy Portillo's badly bruised face Monday as she walked behind coffins carrying her mother and only child in this town buried by a landslide, one in a series that killed at least 130 people in El Salvador.

Portillo's body was flung repeatedly against the walls as she fought to keep her 7-year-old son from being swept away in the powerful river of mud, boulders and floodwaters overtaking their home in the pre-dawn hours Sunday.

The 40-year-old woman survived but said she lost everything she had lived for.

"My little angel was taken away," she said, sobbing, her right eye swollen shut. "My little angel was taken away."

Days of heavy rains unleashed flooding and mudslides across this mountainous Central American country Sunday.

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The country's congress voted Monday to declare a 3-day period of national mourning starting Tuesday. It also declared a state of disaster, a measure that allows President Mauricio Funes to use government funds for relief and to accept international aid.

Hurricane Ida's presence in the western Caribbean late last week may have played a role in drawing the rain-packed, Pacific low-pressure system toward El Salvador on the other side of Central America, said Dave Roberts, a U.S. Navy hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida. Ida weakened Monday as it lost strength over the water on its way to a landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

No place was harder hit than Verapaz, a poor, farming town of 7,000 people on the slopes of the Chichontepec volcano, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) east of the capital, San Salvador.

Boulders, many weighing more than a ton, littered the cobblestone streets Monday. Cars and homes protruded from mounds of mud. Bloated dead cows lay on rooftops after being hurled into the air — attesting to the force of the deluge that turned the normally picturesque coffee-growing town into a disaster zone.