A landslide triggered by heavy rains in a remote gold-prospecting town in northern Bolivia has killed 14 people, with 400 others feared buried beneath tons of mud and rock.
A mountainside washed into Chima, 117 miles from the capital, La Paz, on Monday, burying more than 100 houses in mud.
"We believe there must be between 300 and 400 people buried there," Defence Minister Freddy Teodovic said, saying he received preliminary reports a market and transportation terminal had been engulfed as well as houses.
Officials previously feared 200 people were missing in the area, which was declared a disaster zone by President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.
"The people here are resigned to the fact they will never know how many people were killed," said one doctor who arrived with a convoy of rescuers after a grueling 10-hour journey to reach the town, accessible only by a winding 360-mile road.
Government officials said the US Embassy lent rescue teams, four helicopters and an airplane that are usually used in efforts to eradicate illegal crops of coca, the plant used to make cocaine. Bad weather hampered air travel to the area.
The mudslide was the latest in a series of similar disasters that have killed hundreds of people over the past decade in the gold-rich north near the border with Peru and Brazil, where miners in one of the Western Hemisphere's poorest countries pan for gold using century-old technology.
Sixty people were killed by a mudslide in the jungle gold-mining town of Mocotoro in 1998, while a mountain slide was estimated to have killed hundreds in 1992 in Llipi.
Thousands of people were killed by mudslides in Venezuela in 1999 on the mountainous northern coast near Caracas.