HUAUCHINANGO: Standing next to her sister’s lifeless body, Rosalia Ortega was grateful to have found her in the river of mud that suddenly swept away her home as torrential rains lashed her Mexican mountain town.
At least 47 people have died since Thursday as floods wreaked destruction in the hardest-hit states of Hidalgo, Puebla, Queretaro and Veracruz.
“We are sad, but at least we will give him a Christian burial,” Ortega, 76, said. AFP in the town of Huauchinango, in Puebla, a state east of Mexico which, according to official reports, resulted in nine deaths and significant damage.
The disaster area is the Sierra Madre Oriental, a mountain range parallel to Mexico’s eastern coast and dotted with villages where telecommunications and other services have yet to be restored.
Well after dark on Thursday, a rain-swollen mountain river overflowed its banks in Huauchinango and within minutes robbed local residents of their homes and, in some cases, their loved ones.
This is what happened to Maria Salas, a 49-year-old cook who sheltered from the rain with an umbrella and watched over two soldiers who guarded the entrance to her neighborhood.
Salas lost five relatives when their house collapsed and his own house was destroyed by a landslide.
“I can’t get my stuff back, I can’t sleep there,” she said. “I have nothing.”
Grieving families struggle to pay for funerals and, if anything is left, to salvage something from lost or damaged homes.
Huauchinango, with 100,000 residents, is one of the largest communities in the disaster zone and one of the few to be accessible Saturday.
Rivers of mud
Floodwaters washed away everything in their path, forming heavy rivers of mud that made even intact houses unusable.
“It was up to my knees,” said Petra Rodriguez, a 40-year-old domestic worker whose house was surrounded by water on both sides.
She, her husband and two sons managed to escape, holding hands, so that if the water took one of them, “it would take all of us,” she said.
In another part of the city, teacher Karina Galicia, 49, showed AFP his house damaged by mud and mold. She and her family were able to escape; If they hadn’t, “we would have been buried,” she said.
In the least damaged houses, neighbors tried to drain the water using plastic bottles, brooms and shovels.
Adriana Vazquez, 48, climbed a rough path strewn with stones and mud to see if anything remained of a relative’s house.
What she found was a jumble of wooden and tin houses flattened by a landslide. Soldiers were using a backhoe to remove a pile of debris from the street.
Her relative “answered the phone,” Vasquez said, but she could barely hear anything and hoped it was due to a bad connection.
About 100 small communities are unreachable due to road closures and power outages that have complicated telephone service and travel.
Mexico has been hit by particularly heavy rains throughout 2025, with record rainfall recorded in the capital, Mexico City.
Meteorologist Isidro Cano said AFP that the intense rains since Thursday were caused by a change in season and the formation of clouds as warm, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico rises to mountain peaks.
