Four French tourists, including a six-year-old boy, were found alive on Friday after two days lost in the forest of an archaeological park in northern Guatemala, rescuers said.
“The people have been located, a little dehydrated and have been stabilized,” Gustavo Ara, regional director of the volunteer fire department in the department of Petén, near the border with Mexico and Belize, told AFP.
According to a bulletin published by the Guatemalan Tourism Institute, they are Ana Gretel Adelaida Haeussler Pivaral, 40, Patricia Haeussler Porras, 68, Valentin Christian Arnau Carpentier Haeussler, 6, and Antony Cédric Patrick Carpentier, 41 years.
The tourists, all members of the same family, were last seen Wednesday in Tikal National Park, one of the main Mayan archaeological sites in Guatemala.
The four Frenchmen were found within the park itself, about 5 km from the main archaeological area of ????the complex located between the municipalities of Flores and La Libertad, in Petén.
Footage released by rescuers shows the tourists being treated in vans and ambulances before being flown to the Guatemalan capital.
Tikal Park is located more than 500 km north of the capital, near the border with Mexico and Belize. Rich in Mayan remains, composed of pyramids and temples, the site has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979.
In early January 2022, a German tourist, Stephan Baitz, was found dead there, two days after being reported missing in the region.
The 53-year-old had separated from the group he was visiting the site with to explore the paths of the archaeological park before disappearing.
Also in the same park, in 2001, several tourists, including Americans and Europeans, were attacked by hooded and armed men who killed a ranger who was trying to defend them. A tourist from Honduras residing in the United States had been raped.
Guatemala, the most populous country in Central America with nearly 18 million inhabitants, is plagued by 36 years of civil war, organized crime, corruption and poverty.
The country is one of the most violent on the continent, with a homicide rate of 17.3 per 100,000 inhabitants at the end of 2022, according to the UN, half attributed to criminal gangs (maras) and drug trafficking transiting through his territory.
Central America’s largest economy remains one of the most unequal countries in the Americas with a poverty rate of 59.3%, according to the World Bank.
Guatemala received a peak of some 2.5 million foreign tourists in 2019, which left receipts of nearly US$1.3 billion.
In 2022, after the pandemic, 1.8 million visitors entered the country. The main countries of origin for tourists this year were El Salvador (39%), another small country in Central America, and the United States (24%), according to the Guatemalan Institute of Tourism.
12/08/2023 01:55:49 – Guatemala (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
