The eye of a deadly powerful Category Five storm has struck Mexico, the US National Hurricane Centre has said.
Dean has already struck Guadeloupe Hurricane Dean has begun to lash Mexico's Caribbean coast, with heavy rain and howling winds battering beach resorts where thousands of tourists are huddling in shelters.
"It is a hugely destructive storm - you don't see Category Five hurricanes every day," said Sky News weather presenter Isobel Lang.
"In the next couple of hours the coast north of Belize will feel its full force, while the holiday resort of Cancun will experience excessive rain and the strong winds of the hurricane's outer bands."
Tens of thousands of tourists have already fled but the Federation of Tour Operators has said there are still around 5,000 British holidaymakers in Yucatan resorts.
About 70,000 people have left the coastal areas in the past few days and thousands of others have been waiting for hours at airports.
Mexico's neighbour Belize lies next in the path of Hurricane Dean.
The Belizean government has evacuated Caye Caulker and Ambergris Caye - both popular with U.S. tourists.
People were also told to leave low-lying areas and obey a dusk-to-dawn curfew from Belize City to the Mexican border.
Clear-up begins in Kingston, Jamaica Authorities evacuated Belize City's three hospitals and were moving high-risk patients inland to the nation's capital, Belmopan, founded after 1961's Hurricane Hattie devastated Belize City.
Mayor Zenaida Moya urged residents to leave Belize City, saying it does not have shelters strong enough to withstand a storm of Dean's size.
The owner of an inn north of Belize City, Dahlia Castillo, said: "We have evacuated our guests, and we are putting up everything we can put up.
"Then we need to get ourselves somewhere safe, because we are right by the water.
Tourists queue to leave Belize airport "The only thing we've had like this before that I can remember was a tropical storm in 2001, and that brought in some water and did some damage - and that was only a tropical storm."
At its worst today, Dean was expected to produce as much as 20 inches of rain - a deluge which could lead to life-threatening flash floods and mudslides.
Sea water could surge over Yutacan beaches as high as 18ft.
The storm was expected to slash across Belize and the Yucatan, to later emerge in the Gulf of Campeche, where oil production on offshore rigs has been stopped.
The worst storm to hit Latin America in modern times was 1998's Hurricane Mitch, which killed nearly 11,000 people and left more than 8,000 missing, mostly in Honduras and Nicaragua.
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