Families bid farewell to victims of Guatemala bus crash

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SANTO DOMINGO LOS OCOTES, Guatemala (AP) — Hours before dawn, Julio Arrivillaga and Catalina Pérez Molina boarded a bus with other residents in the center of this humble village for what should have been an hour-long ride to Guatemala’s capital.

For Arrivillaga it was a daily trip to his job counting fruit in the country’s largest market. For Pérez Molina, it was her occasional dash to the capital to buy produce for the tamales and roasted corn she sold.

But along the way their bus left the road and tumbled into a deep ravine, killing them and more than 50 others.

On Tuesday, families in Santo Domingo Los Ocotes, accompanied by President Bernardo Arévalo, began saying goodbye to their loved ones amid a three-day period of national mourning.

Guatemala’s National Forensic Science Institute said Tuesday that 54 people had died in the crash. A day earlier, the Public Ministry said 53 people had died at the site of the crash and two more at a hospital and had not reconciled the numbers Tuesday.

“I still don’t understand what happened,” Arrivillaga’s wife Irma Catalán said Tuesday. “I haven’t accepted it. I don’t know what my life will be now.”

Videos circulated online of the moments before the Monday accident show the bus apparently speeding, running stoplights and colliding with multiple vehicles before leaving the roadway and plunging into the ravine where it landed upside down beneath a bridge and semi-submerged in dark sewage-polluted waters.

In Santo Domingo Los Ocotes, funerals were scheduled over two days.

Pérez Molina was among those buried Tuesday.

Christian Pérez, her 25-year-old son, said he was still in shock at the loss of his mother. He’s been confined to a wheelchair since a motorcycle accident seven years ago, and she was the one who sustained their family.

“I can’t deny it, her loss really hurts,” Pérez said.

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