Flooding caused by heavy rains also has led to the evacuation of an estimated 100,000 people in Paraguay and more than 4,000 in Uruguay.
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More than 160,000 people have been driven from their homes in Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay in some of the worst floods in decades, which have left at least six people dead, authorities said Saturday.
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In the worse affected country, Paraguay, around 90,000 people in the area around the capital city Asuncion have been evacuated, the municipal Emergency Office said.
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Many are poor families living in precarious housing along the banks of the River Paraguay.
The Paraguayan government has declared a state of emergency in Asuncion and seven regions of the country to free up funds to help those affected.
The governor of Entre Rios said the number of evacuees across the province could move beyond 10,000 to “between 16,000 to 20,000”.
El Nino is the name given to a weather pattern associated with a sustained period of warming in the central and eastern tropical Pacific that can spark deadly and costly climate extremes.
“This is the worst flooding in 50 years”, he said, adding that although “flooding was predicted due to El Nino, no one thought that it would be so substantial”.
It is a similar situation to past year, when the river rose in the same way, displacing 85,000 people in the capital and more than 200,000 elsewhere in the country.
Pena said that national government aid was already on its way and that President Mauricio Macri, who took office this month, meant to make improving infrastructure a priority so that such flooding did not occur again.
“Argentina has a very big lack of infrastructure”, he said.
A 13-year-old boy was electrocuted by a power cable while trying to assess storm damage to his home in the city of Corrientes, local media reported.
In the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, almost 1800 families in dozens of towns have been forced to leave their homes.
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The weather is expected to dry up on the Brazilian border with Uruguay, but rain is expected to continue in Paraguay and Argentina, with water levels rising.
