Colombian rescue teams on Monday recovered 21 bodies of victims killed by a mudslide that ripped through a poor hillside area above Medellin, but they feared that more than a hundred other people, including dozens of children, may have died in the disaster. The mudslide, which occurred Sunday as a clear blue sky prevailed over Medellin, was induced by heavy rains in recent weeks that have damaged as many as 200,000 homes across Colombia. So far, the rains, considered the worst in Colombia in decades, have killed more than 200 people. 'I hope we don't have to declare this site a cemetery,' Oscar Andres Perez, mayor of Bello, the district in which the mudslide struck, said in a telephone interview. He said many of the victims were children gathered in a playground as their families celebrated the children's First Communion. Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia's president, canceled a trip to Mexico for an international conference on climate change to attend to the disaster, which he said might have been caused by the extreme weather brought by global warming. He planned to meet with victims in Medellin and oversee the rescue effort instead. In a statement, Santos said he had expected 'to attend the international conference on climate change, which is what is affecting us, but I canceled the meeting.' The torrential rains, thought to be caused by the weather phenomenon known as La Nina, which periodically creates increased rainfall in parts of South America, have also afflicted neighboring Venezuela, where President Hugo Chavez has ordered hotels with vacancies to shelter thousands of people who lost their homes as a result of flooding. In the hillside above Medellin, residents who were nearby at the time of the mudslide said it arrived suddenly with a thunderous roar around midday Sunday, when many families were eating lunch together. More than a dozen homes made of wood and cinder block were immediately buried under tons of mud and debris. 'We didn't think something like this could happen,' said Luis Fernando Calderon, 34, a construction worker, in a telephone interview as he waited for rescuers to give him news about his wife and daughter, who were buried under the mud. Given the conditions of the disaster, he said, he had given up hope of finding them. 'This avalanche took everything I had,' he said. 'Apart from losing my family, I'm now on the street.' Others awaiting information about their loved ones held out hope. Some pointed to the reports of people pulled alive from the rubble of the earthquake that devastated Haiti earlier this year. 'If in Haiti they rescued so many people after their houses collapsed, then why shouldn't my daughters and my husband's family survive?' asked Maria Leonor Garcia, a resident of the area hit by the mudslide, in comments broadcast by Colombian radio. 