Update:Mexico Floods Kill 222...10/08/99

TEZIUTLAN, Mexico (AP) - It had been raining for days, harder and harder, until you could measure the rain in feet instead of inches. It rushed in torrents down the streets that snake through this mountain city's ravines, drenching the hillsides. And then shortly after noon on Tuesday, the slope under part of a cemetery on the edge of town gave way. Headstones, coffins and at least one unearthed corpse poured down the slope in an avalanche of mud that buried the neighborhood of La Aurora below. Mexican officials Friday said at least 222 people have died in days of floods and mudslides that wrought havoc in a broad swath along Mexico's Gulf Coast and south. The worst toll so far occurred in this city on a mountain ridge, where more than 100 bodies have been pulled from a mudslide-buried neighborhood.

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