Mayor Ediberto Tabares of the
township of Atoyac said late yesterday that 15 bodies had been recovered in the
village. .
Atoyac, a largely rural township
about 42 miles west of Acapulco, is accessible only by a highway blocked
multiple times by landslides and flooding.
Ricardo de la Cruz, a spokesman for
the federal Department of Civil Protection, said the death toll had risen to 80
from 60 earlier in the day, although he did not provide details of the reports
that drove it up.
In Acapulco, three days of Biblical
rain evaporated into broiling late-summer sunshine that roasted thousands of
tourists trying to escape the city, and hundreds of thousands of residents
returning to homes devastated by reeking tides of brown floodwater.
The depth of the destruction wreaked
by Manuel, which first hit Mexico on Sunday as a tropical storm, was
highlighted when the transportation secretary said it would be Friday at the
earliest before authorities cleared the roads connecting the resort to Mexico
City and the rest of the world.
Hundreds of residents of Acapulco's
poor outlying areas slogged through waist-high water to pound on the closed
shutters of a looted supermarket, desperate for food, drinking water and other
basics.
In the upmarket Diamond Zone, the
military commandeered a commercial centre for tourists trying to get onto one
of the military or commercial flights that remained the only way out of the
city.
Thousands queued outside the mall's
locked gates, begging for a seat on a military seat or demanding that airline
Aeromexico honour a previously purchased ticket.
"We don't even have money left
to buy water," said Tayde Sanchez Morales, a retired electric company
worker from the city of Puebla.
"The hotel threw us out and
we're going to stay here and sleep here until they throw us out of here."
A lucky few held up ransacked beach
umbrellas against the sun. Temperatures were in the mid-80s but felt far
hotter. Dozens of others collapsed in some of the few spots of shade..
Authorities said at least 8,000
people had been flown out of the city on 49 flights by yesterday afternoon, a
fraction of the 40,000 to 60,000 tourists estimated to be stranded in the city.
