Rains sweeping Central America over the past week, causing landslides and severe damage to infrastructure and crops, have killed at least 27 people, mainly in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, official sources said today.

“Unfortunately, the death toll now stands at 19,” Luis Amaya, director general of El Salvador’s Civil Protection agency, said in a televised interview.

The death toll in El Salvador rose from 13 to 19 between Thursday and Friday, along with the deaths of two little girls whose home was crushed by a landslide in Soyapango, 9 km east of San Salvador.

Amaya called on citizens to move away from areas characterized as “very high risk”, stressing that in several regions of El Salvador houses on hillsides were evacuated as a precaution.

In Guatemala, authorities reported seven deaths and extensive damage to roads and bridges.

In Honduras, one death was recorded among nearly 3,500 affected. Several isolated villages have been cut off from all communication due to rising water levels in rivers in the south of the country, near the border with El Salvador, according to an AFP journalist.

In Nicaragua, no deaths have yet been reported, but homes have been flooded and roads damaged by overflowing rivers.

According to El Salvador’s Environment Minister Fernando Lopez, the bad weather will continue until Saturday, as a result of a low pressure phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean and the indirect effect of Tropical Storm Alberto – which was downgraded on Thursday to a tropical depression – which caused the death of four people upon her arrival in Mexico.