Mexican officials raised the death toll to 39 today from Hurricane Otis, which struck the country's southern Pacific coast including the resort city of Acapulco earlier this week as a powerful Category 5 storm.
Security Secretary Rosa Icela Rodríguez said in a recorded video message with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador posted to the platform X, formerly Twitter, that the probable cause of death for the 39 was "suffocation by submersion".
She said the victims had not yet been identified and that investigations continue.
The new death toll was an increase of 12 over the initial tally of 27 announced on Friday.
But the storm's human toll was becoming a point of contention as local media reported the recovery of more bodies and López Obrador criticised opponents for trying to make it a political issue.
Rodríguez also said the number of missing rose to 10. Hundreds of families have been awaiting word from loved ones.
In Acapulco today, government workers and volunteers cleared streets, gas station lines wrapped around the block for what fuel was to be had, and some lucky families found food essentials as a more organised relief operation took shape four days after the storm hit.
Military personnel and volunteers worked along Acapulco's main tourist strip.
They sliced through fallen palm trees and metal signs. Cellphone signals were partially recovered near some of the city's most luxurious hotels, and authorities placed a charging station for people to charge their phones.
But on the periphery of the city, neighbourhoods remained in total chaos. The government presence found in the touristic centre was not visible in other neighbourhoods.
With no signal, with no water and no food, families and the elderly trudged through foot-deep mud and flooded streets to get to large warehouses someone had found full of food, taking bags of food and liquids.
Aid has been slow to arrive. The Category 5 storm's destruction cut off the city of nearly a million people for the first day; it had intensified so quickly that little to nothing had been staged in advance.
Authorities had the difficult task of searching for the dead and missing. Many had remained incredulous that the government's initial death toll of 27 and four missing had not risen in the past two days. Hundreds of families awaited word from loved ones.
Gasoline had been unavailable, not because there wasn't any, but because there was no electricity to operate the pumps.
Most families anxiously hunted for water, with some saying they were rationing their supplies. The municipal water system was out because its pumps had no power.
Officials said the military presence would grow to 15,000 in the area and López Obrador called on his armed forces to set up checkpoints in the city to avoid robberies.
López Obrador said the national electric company had told him that service had been resumed to 55% of customers in the affected area but that more than 200,000 homes and businesses remained without power.
The federal civil defence agency had tallied 220,000 homes that were damaged by the storm, he said.
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