Hurricane Stan strikes Central America

VERACRUZ, Mexico -- Hurricane Stan slammed into Mexico's Gulf coast Tuesday, forcing authorities to close one of the nation's busiest ports and spawning related storms across the region that left at least 59 people dead, most from landslides in El Salvador.\nStan, which whipped up maximum sustained winds of 80 mph before weakening to a tropical storm, came ashore along a sparsely populated stretch of coastline south of Veracruz, a major port 185 miles east of Mexico City.\nThe storm's outer bands swiped the city, knocking down trees and flooding low-lying neighborhoods, authorities said. There were no immediate reports of injuries.\nAll three of Mexico's Gulf coast crude-oil loading ports were closed Tuesday as a precaution, authorities said, but the shutdowns were not expected to affect oil prices.\nMeteorologists said Stan was driving separate storms across Central America and southern Mexico, provoking flooding and landslides. At least 41 people were killed in El Salvador, the majority in landslides Tuesday. Nine people died in Nicaragua, including six people believed to be Ecuadorean migrants killed when their boat ran ashore.\nFour deaths were reported in Honduras and three in Guatemala. In Costa Rica, a 36-year-old woman was killed when her home was buried by a landslide early Tuesday.\nIn Mexico's southern state of Chiapas, a river overflowed its banks and roared through the city of Tapachula, carrying away ramshackle homes of wood and metal. One man was killed and dozens of people were missing Tuesday, the Televisa television network reported.\nA state civil protection official said he could not confirm the report because communication with Tapachula was cut off.\nRain was falling Tuesday in much of Central America, forcing thousands from their homes. Among those evacuated were residents of San Salvador's Santa Tecla neighborhood, where an earthquake-triggered landslide in January 2001 killed some 500 people.\nOfficials have worried the mountain running alongside the neighborhood might collapse again with heavy rains or another quake.\nMexico offered to send aid to El Salvador, if needed.\n"We are keeping an eye on the situation in El Salvador," presidential spokesman Ruben Aguilar said Tuesday.\nIn the southern state of Oaxaca, also affected by heavy rains and wind, officials opened 950 shelters and were keeping an eye on 80 communities considered to be vulnerable.\nIn Veracruz, schools canceled classes and officials at a nearby nuclear power plant had readied the facility for the category 1 hurricane's strong winds and rains.\nThousands of residents abandoned their homes and stayed in some of the 2,000 shelters set up all along the coastline.\nAt Chachalacas beach, 20 miles north of Veracruz, Celestino Criollo struggled amid rising winds and intermittent rains to clear equipment from his beach-side, thatched-roof seafood restaurant.\nCriollo said the storm's rapid approach had caught many beach dwellers by surprise.\n"We knew it would be strong and the tide high, but we didn't think it would come this quick," he said. "They advised us, but they could have done it sooner"