At least 47 people have died since Thursday as floods have wreaked a trail of destruction in the hardest-hit states of Hidalgo, Puebla, Queretaro and Veracruz.
"We're sad, but at least we're going to give her a Christian burial," Ortega, 76, told AFP in the town of Huauchinango, in Puebla, a state east of Mexico City that according to official reports saw nine deaths and substantial damage.
The disaster zone is the Sierra Madre Oriental, a mountain range that runs parallel to Mexico's east coast and is dotted with villages where telecommunications and other services have yet to be restored.
On Thursday, well after dark, a rain-swollen mountain river overflowed its banks in Huauchinango and within minutes robbed local residents of their homes and, in some cases, their loved ones.
That's what happened to Maria Salas, a 49-year-old cook sheltering from the rain with an umbrella, watching two soldiers guarding the entrance to her neighborhood.
Salas lost five relatives when their house collapsed, and her own home was destroyed by a landslide.
"I can't get my belongings, I can't sleep there," she said. "I have nothing."
The grieving families are struggling to pay for funerals and, if anything is left over, to recover something from lost or damaged homes.
Huauchinango, with 100,000 residents, is one of the largest communities in the disaster zone and one of a very few that could be accessed Saturday.
- Rivers of mud -
The floodwaters swept away everything in their path, forming heavy rivers of mud that even rendered intact homes unusable.
"It was knee-deep," says Petra Rodriguez, a 40-year-old domestic worker whose house was surrounded by water on both sides.
She, her husband and two sons managed to escape, holding hands so that if the water took one of them, "it would take us all," she said.
In another part of town, teacher Karina Galicia, 49, showed AFP her mud-damaged, musty house. She and her family were able to run out; had they not, "we would have been buried," she said.
In less damaged houses, neighbors worked to remove water with plastic bottles, brooms and shovels.
Adriana Vazquez, 48, climbed a rough path strewn with stones and mud to see if anything was left of a relative's house.
What she found was a jumble of wood and tin houses levelled by a landslide. Soldiers were using a backhoe to remove a pile of debris from the street.
Her relative "answered the telephone," Vasquez said, but she could hardly hear anything and hoped that was due to a poor connection.
About 100 small communities are uncontactable due to road closures and power outages that have complicated telephone services and travel.
Mexico has been hit by particularly heavy rains throughout 2025, with a rainfall record set in the capital, Mexico City.
Meteorologist Isidro Cano told AFP that the intense rainfall since Thursday was caused by a seasonal shift and cloud formation as warm, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico rises to the mountaintops.
Spain suffers fresh floods as torrential rains strike
Madrid (AFP) Oct 12, 2025 -
Floods trapped people in vehicles and homes in Spain on Sunday as torrential rain drenched the northeastern Catalonia region, a day after downpours unleashed travel chaos on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza.
Local media shared videos of roaring torrents of brown water tearing through streets and submerging vehicles.
National weather agency AEMET decreed the highest red alert in the province of Tarragona, warning of 180 millimetres of rain in 12 hours in the Ebro river delta.
Catalan fire service spokesman Oriol Corbella told reporters people had been caught by surprise, with people trapped "inside vehicles, in buildings, on ground floors".
The mayor of the town of Santa Barbara, Josep Lluis Gimeno, told regional television station 3Cat the situation was "very tense" as the night brought heavier deluges.
Local streams and ravines "are completely overflowing and have invaded the entire centre of the town, dragging everything there is, containers and cars", he said.
In the village of Godall, mayor Alexis Albiol spoke of "a moment of chaos", telling 3Cat: "All the cars that were in the streets near the ravine were swept away and are distributed throughout the village."
"I don't believe anyone in the village has seen the amount of water that has fallen in such a short time," Albiol added.
A measuring station in nearby Mas de Barberans recorded almost 272 millimetres of rainfall over the weekend, regional weather monitor Meteocat said.
There were nonetheless no reports of people hurt or missing.
- Motorists trapped -
All trains travelling through the Mediterranean corridor from Barcelona and Valencia, Spain's second and third-largest cities respectively, were suspended until further notice, national railway company Renfe announced.
Local media published footage of emergency services rescuing drivers who were trapped on a flooded motorway outside the town of Amposta.
Catalan emergency services published data on the calls they had received showing a sharp spike from 5:00 pm (1500 GMT), with 998 cases generated.
Catalonia's civil protection service extended its mass telephone alert, urging residents to avoid travelling and approaching waterways, to an area encompassing around 100 kilometres (62 miles) on and near the coast.
The leader of Catalonia's regional government, Salvador Illa, said all educational, sporting and social activities would be suspended on Monday in five especially vulnerable regions, urging their residents to avoid travelling and work from home.
The downpours came after the eastern Valencia region, which suffered Spain's deadliest floods in decades last year, emerged relatively unscathed from another red alert that started on Friday.
But some municipalities devastated by last year's disaster cancelled school and outdoor activities planned for Monday due to a fresh rain warning.
Flooding struck the popular holiday island of Ibiza on Saturday for the second time in two weeks as the storm moved east and north into the Mediterranean after drenching southeastern Spain.
Because a hotter atmosphere holds more water that evaporates from a rapidly warming Mediterranean Sea, climate change increases the risk and intensity of flooding from extreme rainfall in the region.
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