At least 48 people died when Hurricane Otis slammed into Mexico’s southern Pacific coast, most of them in Acapulco, authorities said as the death toll continued to climb and families buried loved ones.
Mexico’s civil defence agency said 43 of the dead were in the resort city of Acapulco and five were in nearby Coyuca de Benitez.
Guerrero state’s governor had earlier raised the number of missing to 36 from 10 a day earlier.
The death toll increased after authorities raised it to 39 on Saturday.
In Acapulco, families held funerals for the dead on Sunday and continued the search for essentials while government workers and volunteers cleared streets clogged with muck and debris from the powerful category five hurricane.
Katy Barrera, 30, said on Sunday that her aunt’s family was buried under a landslide when tonnes of mud and rock tumbled on to their home.
Her aunt’s body was found with the remains of their three children aged from two to 21.
Her uncle was still missing.
Separately, Ms Barrera’s mother and brother also remained missing.
“The water came in with the rocks, the mud and totally buried them,” Ms Barrera, who was standing outside a local morgue, said of her aunt’s family.
On Sunday, authorities released the bodies of her aunt and the two youngest children to relatives.
Bodies in white bags were loaded into open caskets in the back of hearses.
The eldest daughter had already been buried the day before.
As she prepared to lay her relatives to rest, Ms Barrera — who had hardly had a chance to search for her mother and brother — expressed desperation and frustration at the aid and personnel she had begun seeing in tourist areas of the city — but not in their neighbourhood high on a mountainside hit by landslides.
“There are many, many people here at the (morgue) that are entire families, families of six, families of four, even eight people,” she said.
“I want to ask authorities not to lie … there are a lot of people who are arriving dead.”
During a short time outside the morgue on Sunday morning, at least half a dozen families arrived, some looking for relatives, other identifying bodies and still others giving statements to authorities.
The sombre convoys of hearses and relatives crossed much of battered Acapulco en route to the cemetery, passing ransacked stores, streets strewn with debris and soldiers cutting away fallen trees.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Saturday that his opponents are trying to inflate the toll to damage him politically, but with hundreds of families still awaiting word from loved ones it was likely to keep rising.
Otis roared ashore early on Wednesday with devastating 165mph winds after strengthening so rapidly that people had little time to prepare.
Kristian Vera stood on an Acapulco beach on Saturday looking out toward dozens of sunken boats, including three of her own, all marked by floating buoys or just poking out of the water.
Despite losing her livelihood in Otis’s brutal assault on the coast, she felt fortunate.
Earlier in the day, she watched a body pulled from the water and saw families coming and going, looking for their loved ones.
Many people rode out on boats in what had started as a tropical storm and in just 12 hours powered up into a catastrophic hurricane.
Leaning against a small wooden fishing boat like her own, tipped on its side on a beach strewn with trash and fallen trees, she said some of the dead were either fishermen caring for their boats or yacht captains who were told by their owners to make sure their boats were OK when Otis was approaching as a tropical storm.
“That night I was so worried because I live off of this, it’s how I feed my kids,” Ms Vera said.
“But when I began to feel how strong the wind was, I said, ‘Tomorrow I won’t have a boat, but God willing, Acapulco will see another day’.”
Military personnel and volunteers worked along Acapulco’s main tourist strip on Saturday and Guerrero state governor Evelyn Salgado said on Sunday that the boulevard had been cleared of debris.
Mr Salgado also said that the national electric company reported restoring power to 58% of homes and businesses in Acapulco and 21 water tankers were distributing water to outlying neighbourhoods.
But on the city’s periphery, neighbourhoods remained in ruins.
Aid has been slow to arrive. The storm’s destruction cut off the city of nearly one million people for the first day, and because Otis had intensified so quickly on Tuesday little to nothing had been staged in advance.
The military presence swelled to 15,000 in the area. Mr Lopez Obrador had called on the armed forces to set up checkpoints in the city to deter looting and robbery.
The federal civil defence agency tallied 220,000 homes that were damaged by the storm, he said.
