HUAUCHINANGO: Standing near her sister’s lifeless body, Rosalía Ortega was grateful for having found her in the river of mud that suddenly swept away her house as torrential rains lashed her Mexican mountain town.
At least 47 people have died since Thursday as floods have left a trail of destruction in the worst-affected states of Hidalgo, Puebla, Querétaro and Veracruz.
“We are sad, but at least we are going to give him a Christian burial,” said Ortega, 76 years old. AFP in the town of Huauchinango, in Puebla, a state east of Mexico City, which according to official reports recorded nine deaths and extensive damage.
The disaster zone is the Sierra Madre Oriental, a mountain range that runs parallel to the east coast of Mexico and is dotted with towns where telecommunications and other services have not yet been restored.
On Thursday, long after dark, a rain-swollen mountain river burst its banks in Huauchinango and within minutes dispossessed local residents of their homes and, in some cases, their loved ones.
That’s what happened to María Salas, a 49-year-old cook sheltering from the rain with an umbrella, watching two soldiers guarding the entrance to her neighborhood.
Salas lost five family members when their house collapsed and his own house was destroyed by a landslide.
“I can’t collect my belongings, I can’t sleep there,” he said. “I don’t have anything.”
Grieving families struggle to pay for funerals and, if there is anything left, to recover some of the lost or damaged homes.
Huauchinango, with 100,000 residents, is one of the largest communities in the disaster zone and one of the few that was accessible on Saturday.
mud rivers
The floods devastated everything in their path, forming heavy rivers of mud that even left intact houses unusable.
“The water was up to his knees,” said Petra Rodríguez, a 40-year-old maid whose house was surrounded by water on both sides.
She, her husband and their two children managed to escape, holding hands so that if the water took one of them, “it would take us all,” she said.
In another area of the city, teacher Karina Galicia, 49, showed AFP his house moldy and damaged by mud. She and her family were able to run away; If they hadn’t, “they would have buried us,” he said.
In the least damaged houses, neighbors worked to remove the water with plastic bottles, brooms and shovels.
Adriana Vázquez, 48, climbed a rugged path full of rocks and mud to see if anything remained of a relative’s house.
What he found was a pile of wooden and tin houses devastated by a landslide. The soldiers were using a backhoe to remove a pile of debris from the street.
His relative “answered the phone,” Vasquez said, but he could barely hear anything and hoped it was due to a bad connection.
About 100 small communities are inaccessible due to road closures and power outages that have complicated phone services and travel.
Mexico has been hit by particularly heavy rainfall throughout 2025, with a rainfall record set in the capital, Mexico City.
Said meteorologist Isidro Cano AFP that the heavy rains since Thursday were caused by a seasonal change and the formation of clouds as warm, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico rises to the mountain tops.
