At least 51 people were killed in Guatemala City on Monday when a bus crashed through a guard railroad and immersed himself in a ravine, said rescuers, one of the worst traffic accidents in Latin America in years.
The municipal fire department said the bodies of 51 people were recovered from the bus remains, which took more than 70 people when it crashed into a bridge in a river contaminated with effluents.
Victor Gómez, spokesman for the voluntary firefighters group who was involved in the rescue effort, confirmed that there were “51 bodies in the provisional morgue.”
Rescuers had already managed to get 10 people injured from the remains.
Guatemalan president Bernardo Arevalo, expressed his pain for tragedy and declared an unspecified period of national grief.
“Today is a difficult day for the Guatemalan nation,” he said.
The fire department said the driver lost control of the bus and collided with several small vehicles before falling on the cliff.
“The bus continued, broke a metal railing and fell into a ravine of about 20 meters (65 feet) deep until it reached the contaminated wastewater river,” Carlos Hernández from the department told journalists.
AFPTV The images showed firefighters that passed bodies taken from the murky waters, which were full of garbage, on the slope of the stretchers.
According to local media, the bus was traveling to Guatemala City from the city of San Agustín Acasaguastlan in the department of El Progreso, about 90 kilometers from the northeast.
The Minister of Communications, Miguel Angel Díaz, said that an initial investigation showed that the bus was 30 years old but still had a license to operate.
He said that the cause of the morning accident was still unknown and that the researchers were investigating whether the bus was overloaded with passengers.
Traffic accidents that lead to dozens of deaths are common in Central and South America.
In January 2018, 52 people were killed in Peru when a bus fell into a cliff to a beach north of the capital of Lima.
In Brazil, 54 people were killed in March 2015 in a tourist bus accident in the southern state of Santa Catarina.
