Unidentified bodies pile up in coronavirus crisis-torn Latin America
Bodies are being piled up across Manaus in northern Brazil as the city is brought to its knees by Covid-19.
The local health system collapsed more than two weeks ago and gravediggers have resorted to burying the dead in mass graves known as “trenches”.
A shortage of cemetery staff forced one family to bury their father themselves after a three-day hunt for his body among heaps of corpses.
“There were lots of bodies on top of each other, without any identification,” one man told the local press.
Brazil is fast becoming Latin America’s crisis centre, as the daily death toll begins to outstrip some of the worst-affected countries in Europe.
Jair Bolsonaro, the far-Right Brazilian president, has taken a laissez-faire approach, and has been dismissive of the crisis. In a press briefing last Wednesday, when asked about the 474 deaths that day, he replied: “So what? I’m sorry. What do you want me to do?”
While Brazil is grappling with rising numbers, some of the most harrowing scenes have played out in Ecuador.
Families dumped their dead in the street, with coffins piled up by the hundreds in saturated morgues, reports claim.
Ecuador’s Government has reported 29,538 cases and 1564 deaths, but Lenin Moreno, the president, has said the official number is “coming up short” and has called for transparency.
By the end of April, Covid19-related deaths began to drop and now the Government plans to loosen the lockdown. That decision will be reversed if infections rise.
Throughout Latin America, the economic impact of lockdown measures are set to be enormous, with 29 million expected to be pushed into poverty. It has also changed migration trends.
This is being felt acutely by Venezuelans. After fleeing to neighbouring Colombia in high numbers for the past few years, 12,000 Venezuelans recently returned due to Colombia’s strict lockdown measures. The migrants, mostly informal labourers, say they’ve lost their income and homes in Colombia.
The desperation for work is also being felt by people living hand-tomouth in Mexico, where Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the Left-wing president, has shied away from the kind of draconian lockdowns enforced in El Salvador. Many believe he fears being perceived as using repressive measures and he has made extremely optimistic statements about Mexico’s capacity to fight the virus. In late April, he said Mexico had seen off the worst.
Mexico has had 2154 deaths and 23,471 cases, and reports of struggling hospitals and a health system overwhelmed are widespread. Nevertheless, Lopez Obrador expects to lift the lockdown by the end of May.