Rescue workers recovered 23 bodies but said more than 100 people remained missing and feared dead Monday following a landslide that buried a poor Medellin suburb amid Colombia's heaviest rains in decades.
Colombia has been experiencing torrential downpours due to the La Nina weather phenomenon. The rains and floods have killed around 170 people so far this year, mostly in recent months, and affected 1.5 million others.
A sodden hillside collapsed on Sunday in Bello, near Antioquia province's capital Medellin, burying or destroying about 50 homes.
"Among the 23 bodies recovered are 11 children," said John Rendon, disaster coordinator for Antioquia state, where Bello is located. Local authorities said nine of the children were playing in a park when the landslide struck.
Claudia Patricia Molina, 37, lost her home when the hillside came crashing down with a roar that sounded "as if someone had placed a bomb." She was about four blocks away, visiting friends, when the slide struck.
"It shook powerfully and when we looked over we saw rocks falling," she said. A couple who lived next to Molina were buried alive with their 2-year-old daughter, she added.
'Let them be found alive' "At just past 2 in the afternoon I heard a loud buzzing sound," Jose Cardenas told the El Colombiano newspaper with tears in his eyes. "Then I ran for my house and I got one of my girls. It all became cloudy, you couldn't see anything because of the dust and explosions and shouts could be heard."
Cardenas said he was still looking for his oldest daughter, four grandchildren and son-in-law.
Another resident told the newspaper that "my aunt, my mother, my little brothers are buried there — by God, let them be found alive."
Cardenas called the landslide "an announced tragedy" and blamed the disaster on a rubble heap near the top of the hill. "We sent letters to (officials), they closed the tip but they did nothing with the weight of earth and rubble that threatened us," he said.
Orfanely Madrigal cried as workers and residents slowly dug at the mud that buried her children, her mother and other family members.
"I foresaw this tragedy," she said on local radio. "I told my mother this was a high-risk area but nobody believed me," she said. "I've lost half my family — my mother, four brothers, nephews and my 13- and 10-year-old daughters."
'No precedents in our history'
Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos said on Sunday the number of homeless from the rains could reach 2 million.
"The tragedy the country is going through has no precedents in our history," Santos said, after flying over the coastal region of Atlantico to see the situation first hand.
In neighboring Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez blamed "criminal" capitalism for global climate change, including the region's rains that have also killed more than 30 and left tens of thousands homeless in his country.