More than 5,000 people have been forced to flee their homes since a deluge late Monday caused landslides that buried dozens of people and unleashed flooding in the cities of Juiz de Fora and Uba.

On Wednesday night, residents received yet another alert on their cellphones as rain lashed the region.

"It rained a lot, the riverbank collapsed even further, and civil defense called us to evacuate," Luiz Otavio Souza, a 35-year-old salesman who had to leave his home and whose nephew is missing, told AFP.

"Everyone is panicking, friends and relatives are asking how we are, it's like a horror movie," said the resident of Parque Burnier, one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods in Juiz de Fora, where a wall of mud buried multiple houses on Monday night.

In the Tres Moinhos neighborhood, three houses were buried by landslides in the early morning hours of Thursday after their residents were evacuated, according to an AFP reporter on the scene.

Several residents who had to abandon their homes returned to the neighborhood to retrieve furniture, appliances, mattresses, and even pets they had left behind.

The governor of Minas Gerais, Romeu Zema, on Wednesday denied accusations that his government had reduced investments in protection against such natural disasters.

His comments on X came after the television program Jornal Nacional reported the state government had cut spending to prevent such disasters by 95 percent over the past three years.

The tragedy is the latest in a series of extreme weather disasters in Brazil, from floods to fires and drought, many of which scientists have linked to the effects of global warming.

Brazilian meteorologist Carlos Nobre attributed the unusually heavy downpours to a passing cold front system over the "very warm" Atlantic Ocean.

He told AFP this causes a lot of water evaporation and the formation of cumulonimbus clouds "which cause these enormous downpours."

"All these extreme phenomena are associated with the fact that global warming brings more energy into the atmosphere."

The mayor of Juiz de Fora, Margarida Salomao, said the municipality had experienced its wettest February on record.

In 2024, more than 200 people died and two million were impacted by unprecedented flooding in southern Brazil, one of the worst natural disasters in its history.

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