Guatemalan President Alejandro Maldonado announced Wednesday that his government will build homes for people who lost their houses in a devastating mudslide on Oct. 1.

It is not clear where the new houses will be built, since the area where the mudslide happened is no longer habitable.

The landslide buried nearly 125 houses and has already claimed the lives of nearly 200 people, though the death toll is expected to rise. There are still homes buried under tons of dirt in the El Cambray 2 neighborhood, while an estimated 300 people are still missing.

In another report, national disaster agency Conred said Thursday that the death toll rose to 220 bodies while some 350 were still missing.

Crews are still searching for people who are presumed dead. Entire families were found huddled together and buried alive on Tuesday. Reuters posted a photo to Twitter of crew members at work, digging up homes and bodies.

Conred tells The Star that 386 people were evacuated from the area that has been prone to massive flooding. Rescue workers have spent the week digging up bodies and searching for missing persons. Initially there were 600 missing.

Prosecutors in Guatemala are investigating to see if any criminal activity occurred at the site, after Conred warned officials that building homes in the neighborhood would be dangerous. The area was officially declared uninhabitable this week.

Meanwhile, Conred had issued a number of warnings about the instability of the area in recent years.

"What we know is that people were conscious about the risk they were taking," Manuel Pocasangre, the communications director for the municipality of Santa Catarina Pinula, told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday.

He said state employees spent recent years going door-to-door warning people about the risks of living in the area.

The recent mudslide is one of Guatemala's worst since a 2005 landslide claimed the lives of 1,400 villagers in Panabaj.

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