Rescuers fought through crumbling mountains and waterlogged plains on Friday to try to reach survivors of landslides and floods that have killed at least 218 people in Central America and Southern Mexico.
An elite emergency team worked through a night of fog and rain, amid multiple landslides, in their effort to get to the Maya Indian village of Santiago Atitlan, where 40 people died in one of hundreds of mudslides in the wake of Hurricane Stan.
However, the winding Pan-American highway that is Guatemala's lifeline to the rest of the world was impassable in parts. As one torrent of debris was cleared, more earth tumbled from sodden mountainsides, blocking the way.
"Whatever happens, we have to reach them," rescuer Jose Victor Chavez said, picking his way through rubble-strewn roads flanked by walls of soggy dirt 10 feet (three-metres) high.
The rescue team planned to make a fresh attempt on Friday morning to reach Santiago Atitlan, a tourist destination which sits on Lake Atitlan, a picturesque collapsed volcanic cone filled with turquoise water.
Stranded victims of the mudslides were desperate to reach their family members in the village.
"I've tried to call 20 times but there's no signal. I'm going with a heavy heart because my family's there," said Juan Mateo, 55, who walked for hours on Thursday night to reach Solola and hoped to get to Santiago Atitlan on Friday.
All along the highway to Solola, the region's biggest town, shell-shocked villagers told Reuters reporters travelling with the rescuers of fresh landslides that swept away houses and lives.
Parts of Guatemala's jagged western highlands dissolved under this week's relentless rain, and vast tracts of the country's low-lying agricultural heartland on the Pacific coast turned into oceans of chocolate colored water.
Television footage showed Guatemalans sliding on ropes across a raging torrent from the smashed stump of a concrete bridge.
Reporting 200 landslides, Guatemala's civil protection agency said it had 124 confirmed deaths and that the toll would surely rise. There were at least 65 dead in El Salvador, 15 in Mexico, 10 in Nicaragua and four in Honduras.
Across Central America and southern Mexico, relentless rains have prevented troops from getting drinking water and medicine to remote villages. Although Hurricane Stan fizzled out after slamming into Mexico earlier this week, the rains are forecast to continue into the weekend.
The impoverished region is particularly vulnerable to rain because so many people live in precarious improvised dwellings dangerously close to river beds and on mountainsides.
Cut off by all other means, scores of stranded villagers called into Guatemalan radio stations on cell phones for help.
"There are a lot of people in the shelters but we have nothing to eat," Flor de Maria Perez told a station from the village of Chactela near the border with Mexico. "The children are crying and we don't have any electricity."
Around 2,500 homes have been destroyed in the bustling Mexican town of Tapachula, on the border with Guatemala.
Entire neighbourhoods are flooded after a churning mass of raging muddy water tore Tapachula in two, sending houses and shops tumbling into the rapids.
The city's Coatan river, lined by poorly built shacks, was not much more than a stream before Stan struck.
"No one can hold back nature," said schoolteacher Jose Miguel Sanchez, shaking his head as he looked at a metal railway bridge that had been ripped apart and swept downriver.
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