A FAMILY MEMBER WAILS AS SHE WAITS FOR THE RELEASE OF THE NAMES OF THE DOZENS KILLED IN A FIRE AT A YOUTH SHELTER ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF GUATEMALA CITY.
Dozens of teens die in Guatemala ‘safe home’ fire
SAN JOSE PINULA, GUATEMALA • The hundreds of Guatemalan teenagers in the “safe home” were among society’s most vulnerable. They hailed from broken families and troubled pasts. They battled mental illness, abandonment and abuse.
The boys and girls had faced immensely different realities yet they all held one thing in common: they were sent to the Virgen de la Asunción Safe Home because they had nowhere else to go. But there, it turns out, the abuse only escalated.
The residents of the sprawling complex in the town of San Jose Pinula, Guatemala, were reportedly sexually violated, crammed into overcrowded spaces and given scarce or poor-quality food, authorities said. And it was in a mass escape attempt that 31 girls lost their lives. A dozen died at hospital overnight Thursday after 19 were found burned to death or dead of smoke inhalation in the rubble of a dormitory fire Wednesday.
On Tuesday night, after years of complaints that went unresolved, dozens of residents stormed the gates in a mass escape. Riot police quelled the uproar, returning many back to the facility, where supervisors locked them in their dormitories as punishment.
It was inside one of these dorms that a teen girl made a final, desperate act to be heard.
At about 9 a.m. Wednesday, as other residents ate their breakfast, she set her mattress on fire, according to early reports from authorities. Outside, the residents and staff heard screams. One resident said she heard a girl cry out that she was going to sacrifice herself “so that everyone would know what they were living inside.”
The blaze quickly spread through the dormitory.
“By the time the room was unlocked, it was too late,” Leonel Dubón, director of a Guatemala child advocacy group, told The Washington Post.
Nineteen of the girls, ages 13 to 17, died at the site, their bodies so burned that families struggled to identify them. About 40 others were transported to hospitals.
A wave of anguish swept over the small, impoverished Central American country. The deaths prompted the president, Jimmy Morales, to call for three days of national mourning and the cancellation of all public activities, “given the magnitude of this national tragedy.” The director of the shelter was dismissed, the government announced, promising a thorough investigation.
The deaths were agonizing not just because the victims were so young and vulnerable, but because the government could have pre- vented them, relatives and human rights advocates said. One newspaper referred to it with the words: “The cries that many heard but no one heeded.”
On numerous occasions, as early as 2013, Guatemala’s human rights commission had recommended that the shelter close, due to its overcrowded, inadequate conditions, Abner David Paredes Cruz, a youth advocate at Guatemala’s human rights office, said in an interview with The Post.
Only a few months ago, a judge ordered that the facility begin to transfer its residents back to their families and to other shelters in order to eventually close. Still, the shelter remained open.
“On international women’s day, these young women died due to the state’s lack of action,” Paredes said. “It’s a situation as grave as this one that draws the attention to what needs to change, to what Guatemalan children are living.”
The facility housed about 800 residents in a space meant for 500, and served as a shelter for many who had already served out criminal sentences and had no families or homes to return to.
That meant former convicted felons were sometimes placed in the same living spaces as children recovering from sexual abuse or suffering from mental illness.
“Children from the street, children who had been in gangs, children with disabilities, it was a mix of many populations with many difficulties,” Dubón, director of the child advocacy group El Refugio de la Niñez, said.
The complex, surrounded by trees and a 10-metrewall, consisted of multiple buildings and dormitories. Residents sometimes lacked proper hygiene, clothing, shoes and beds — many had to sleep on decrepit mats on the ground, according to the November 2016 human rights report. At one point, residents alleged there was a lockup known as the “chicken coop” where adolescents were physically punished, according to local press.
Piedad Estrada, a street vendor, arrived at the hospital with a photo of her 16-year-old daughter, who was pregnant and had been at the shelter for nine days after running away. Estrada searched at the hospitals and the morgue in vain. She showed the photo at one hospital, but they said they had five girls who were completely bandaged so they could not be sure. “They only took her from me to burn her,” Estrada said. “I blame the state for what has happened.”
Another woman shouted: “They are not criminals or animals, they are children, they are people, they are adolescents.”
A woman who lived near the shelter told newspaper El Periodico that three of the girls had asked her for help committing suicide. “Give me pills, a knife or something. We don’t want to live here,” they told her.