In El Salvador at least 124 people died, dozens went missing and 7,000 evacuated their homes after intense downpours brought by Hurricane Ida caused floods and mudslides in the Central American country, the government announced Sunday.

President Mauricio Funes declared a national emergency, calling the incident a “grave tragedy” whose damage is “incalculable.”

The provinces affected most by the rains are San Salvador, Cuscatlán, La Libertad, La Paz and San Vicente.

During a televised presidential address, Funes stressed that in the area surrounding San Vicente volcano, authorities reported 355 millimeters of rainfall. “During (Huricane) Mitch, more than 400 millimeters fell in four days. A similar amount this time rained in only four hours,” he said.

The downpours, which intensified during the course of Saturday night and early Sunday morning, also affected several zones of the country's capital of San Salvador, where – Mayor Normal Quijano told local media – a total of 1,300 people with significant property damage has been tallied.

The National Service for Territorial Studies attributed the rains to a low-pressure system located over the Pacific Ocean that intensified with the passage of Hurricane Ida. On Sunday, the hurricane moved into the Gulf of Mexico.

For updates on Hurricane Ida, visit the U.S. National Hurricane Center's Web site: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/#IDA.

Part of a bridge that spans the Río Rincón in Puerto Jiménez, a fishing community and popular tourist destination in southwest Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula, collapsed on Friday when a 95-ton crane attempted to cross it, the daily La Nacion reported.

According to the national daily, the 50-year-old bridge was only meant to support 35 tons.

The crane sustained severe damage to the cab, but the driver escaped unscathed. No injuries were reported.

Friday's collapse came little more than two weeks after a bridge in Turrubares caved under the weight of a school bus carrying 38 passengers, which plunged into the Tárcoles River and claimed five lives. The Turrubares collapse lead to serious questions about the Public Works and Transport Ministry's competence to maintain bridges and forced the resignation of ministry head Karla González.

In September, The National Emergency Commission (CNE) declared a “red alert” over the state of bridges in Costa Rica after a study revealed that dozens of the country's river crossings were in potentially dangerous conditions.

National Roadway Council (CONAVI) press officials said that a new bridge is under construction, but for now the only access to Puerto Jiménez is by air or boat.

The fifth round of free-trade talks with China concluded Friday as representatives from both countries met in Beijing to further define the details of the pending agreement.

The discussions, which spanned four days, centered on defining the regulations for the exchange of products and services between the two countries. Negotiators also discussed which agricultural products their perspective countries will open up for trade.

According to Costa Rica's chief negotiator Fernando Ocampo, the conclusion of this round of discussions “highlighted the importance of both countries to strengthen the legal aspects that regulate the commercial relationship between China and Costa Rica.”

The Foreign Trade Ministry (COMEX), which is working from the Costa Rican side to establish the parameters of the agreement, said that the fifth round of talks allowed both countries to establish important regulations in terms of labor laws, which are vastly different between the two countries, necessary sanitary measures and the permissible limits of trade of certain agricultural products.

The products of chief interest for Costa Rica are beef and meat from China, while China hopes to acquire significant amounts of Costa Rica pineapples, bananas and coffee.

COMEX also reported that Costa Rica proposed an offer to include more Chinese electronics in the agreement, such as DVDs and sound equipment. Chinese representatives said they plan to review the proposal in the upcoming weeks.

The free-trade agreement with the Eastern giant has been highly scrutinized by Costa Rican industries, as there is a building fear that allowing China to participate in the Costa Rican market will harm the business of local producers.

“It's going to break a lot of businesses,” said Tomás Pozuelo, president of the Food Industry Chamber, in an interview with The Tico Times. “We are a country of 4 million people and you want us to compete against a country with over a billion people? They can produce a tremendous amount of volume of goods, at a cheaper price, using cheaper labor. Costa Rican businesses, particularly industrial businesses, cannot compete with that.”

The sixth and final round of the free-trade negotiations with China is scheduled for the second week of February in 2010.

Honduras' de facto government reiterated its position Sunday that the reconciliation agreement remains alive, despite deposed President Manuel Zelaya's remarks that the deal is off.

Zelaya and interim President Roberto Micheletti last week signed the Tegucigalpa-San José Accord, four months after the Honduran military – on government orders – forced Zelaya into exile for allegedly plotting to reform the constitution to eliminate presidential term limits. The agreement enables Zelaya to return to power in a unity government.

But by the end of last week, Zelaya said, “The negotiations have come to an end. We have declared that there is no possibility of recognizing that accord,” according to The Associated Press.

His reason for breaking off the pact, he said, is that Micheletti sought to form the cabinet for a future government of unity and reconciliation without Zelaya's input. Micheletti refuted the accusation, claiming that Zelaya never submitted his list of candidates for the posts. The tit-for-tat remarks repeated through the weekend.

U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly expressed “disappointment with both sides” for the abrupt failure of the accord, which senior State Department officials worked to broker last month. However, without naming the interim president, Kelly implicitly pointed the blame at Micheletti. “It was a unilaterally decided government. And a unilaterally decided government is not a government of unity,” Kelly said during a press briefing in Washington, D.C. Friday.

Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, who served as mediator between the feuding leaders in the weeks following the coup and whose foreign minister participated in negotiations that followed, also expressed dismay at the deadlocked accord.

“We'll never see the de facto government willing to comply with what was originally the San José Agreement and now is the Tegucigalpa-San José Accord,” Arias said according to newswire EFE. “It doesn't surprise me, because the same inflexibility I found during the talks here, in San José, is what we found in Tegucigalpa when we opened up the dialogue.”

For his part, Micheletti is urging the international community to remain neutral on the matter and to stop accusing his administration of sabotaging the Tegucigalpa-San José Accord – named after the Honduran and Costa Rican capitals in which the pact's terms were negotiated.

“Our country should not be punished because one of the parties unilaterally declared (the agreement) a failure,” said a statement issued Sunday afternoon by the Micheletti administration. “Mr. Zelaya is trying to act like the ‘victim,' when in reality his leading role has been (the pact's) ‘executioner,' with the erratic behavior that characterizes him.”

The statement goes on to make a plea to Zelaya camp to rejoin Micheletti in carrying out the terms of “the government of unity and national reconciliation, without looking for pretexts with which to break an agreement whose content they're having doubts about after having signed it.”