What happened here was worse than Hiroshima, but you wouldn't know it by the government's attitude. Many of the survivors have left and what wasn't destroyed was robbed. We're here fending for ourselves. Six months after the December mudslides that killed up to 30,000 people, men bathe and wash a car in the village of Carmen de Uria. Some experts claim that most of the state's 450,000 residents have returned, but a visit here suggests other observers are more accurate when they estimate that about half of Vargas's pre-disaster population is still here.
Many neighborhoods still have no electricity or water.
Many children who have stayed here have no school, and jobs have been wiped out. Hotels and luxury condos sit vacant and ghostlike. A Wendy's restaurant never opens, its once-bright tubular plastic gym clogged with earth. Around Mr. Marchesano's shop, now-dried mudflows ooze from houses, businesses, and abandoned cars like icing from a cake decorator. The governor of Vargas, Alfredo Laya, has put up billboards promising that out of adversity will come something better.