Hundreds of police and bystanders are searching for those missing after the incident near Guatemala City, Jose Victor Chavez, one of the rescue workers, said.
Dozens of people search the rubbish tip every day to take jewellery from bodies dumped there when their relatives cannot afford to pay for the upkeep of their graves, Chavez said. At least six children searching for valuables in the dump are among the missing, he said.
A police spokesman put the death toll at four and said 14 people had disappeared. Scores of poor people forage for scrap metal and other recyclables despite dangers of landslides during seasonal rainfall.
"Yesterday it rained all afternoon and into the night, saturating the land and causing the landslide," Gerson Contreras, a police spokesman, said. "Because of the rains and what happened before, the authorities have been trying to stop people from going there, but their need is so great they just kept coming," Contreras said.
Last month, eight people were killed in a similar collapse at Guatemala City's main rubbish dump, located to the south of the capital.
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- groups:
- News, News and Politics, Current News US, Current News UK
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- News and Politics, News, World, Current News US, 7 more + add
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- explore2learn
- added this
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And at the end of the 2000's, humanity began to be buried in it's own waste, fighting amongst themselves over the last fuel and food.
Sorry, I like playing around with the apocalypse :)
This is pretty much the last way anyone would want to die...-
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- Dmitri_Molotov
- 1 year ago
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So sad that we allow people to live in such poverty that in order to survive they must daily risk their lives like this.
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- goldenways
- 1 year ago
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And then people have the balls to question those who come to this country illegally, the worst we complain about are high gas prices.
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this seems like a really horrible way to die....
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- SilenceNoMore
- 1 year ago
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this is eerily similar to events that happen in that piece of crap movie, idiocracy.
please world, don't let such a ridiculous movie become our reality. -
Our trash is already killing us!
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More proof that Idiocracy is coming true.
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This event is extremely tragic. There are literally millions of people foraging for food in dumps around the world. Often times we see the images of this happening in countries in Africa and Southeast Asia or the Philippines, but this is all too common in Central and South America as well. I am sure that it is happening here too, but it is being kept away from view. Our foragers here are walking the alley's at night and dumpster diving.
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The first thing that comes to my mind is "EW!"
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- This_Is_Not_My_Name
- 1 year ago
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i'm fairly sure that the dumpster divers in this world are happy dumpsters even exist , and can be relied upon to yield something other than BS . it's a kind of recycling innit ? it's not picturesque , but in the absence of the entire world jumping at the opportunity to eliminate poverty for everyone , it serves a function .
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At least in America, if this had happened, the families could have sued the dump site operator for not maintaining a properly safe worksite.
As desperation grows, so does resourcefulness. What will American and other "First World" citizens resort to as the recession deepens?
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the situation altogether sucks, but we can't even solve the problems here in America that caused the dump to exist in the first place. We have that same problem, although we don't have as many people living in the impoverished situations as in the countries where picking through the dump is an everyweek occurrence; we do have people who rifle through discards before they get to the dump. Our demographics in many cities are mixed, divided by neighborhoods and street blocks. What is the problem here? The dumps of the crap that people who waste created, or the fact that too many people must survive off of that crap & risk death to do so?
The problem is humanity in general... we pollute and then complain that it ought to not be this way. Stop whining, everyone, and think of solutions to the problems at hand - the waste we create everyday and ways more than just reducing, reusing, and recycling and think of solutions to the problems our grandparents left us with, and the problems we are creating for our own. Bitter attacks on one another are merely selfish attempts to dismiss the calamity of others while we make ourselves content to continue ignoring the real problems, in this case, killer trash... This should be a wake up call that "Idiocracy" is all too real, and we are showing ourselves to be not a far cry from the ignoramuses depicted in that film. Buck up and be the solution to decades of problems.-
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- superfinet
- 1 year ago
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wow getting killed by trash is the worst situation in trash history
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- metalcookiesxy70
- 1 year ago
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Sad and horrific. Here is a link to Ivar Berglin's five part story at VBS.tv on the Manila garbage dump and the people who live, work and forage there.






