Searching for dead brings extra agony in Guayaquil

ECUADOR - Darwin Castillo’s father died in Guayaquil during the coronavirus pandemic that has caused the Ecuadoran city’s health system to collapse. But when Castillo went to the overwhelmed morgue to recover him, he opened a body bag to find the person inside wasn’t his father.

Two weeks have passed and he still hasn’t found the body. Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, is the capital of Guayas province has recorded roughly 70 percent of the country’s more than 8,200 coronavirus cases.

Castillo, 31, who works in a factory making plastic products, ended up returning the coffin he had purchased to the funeral home.

“I don’t blame the hospital or the morgue. There were people dying at the entrance,” he told AFP. “I would like my dad to appear so I can give him a Christian burial, to give a bouquet of roses to my old man.” Castillo’s father, Manuel, was 76 and a dialysis patient, who died on March 31 due to a catheter obstruction. His son went to the Los Ceibos hospital -- the largest in Guayaquil, which has been dedicated to coronavirus cases -- two days later to recover the body. When he got to the morgue he found it filled with corpses and paid an employee a $150 bribe to recover his father’s body among some 170 that were piled up.

Among the abundance of death, authorities installed a refrigerated truck outside the morgue to hold 46 bodies. When Castillo opened the body bag with the wrong person inside, he was surprised to find “a man with a mustache and different clothes.” “The gentleman had the wristband they give you when you enter the hospital and it said Rodriguez,” Castillo added. So the morgue suggested he search among the bodies, including COVID-19 victims. “If there hadn’t have been this problem, I would have searched from dead to dead for my dad, but I would have been exposing myself” to the virus, he said. So he refused. The chaos in hospitals and funeral parlors -- in addition to the government lockdown -means many bodies remain in homes for days before being collected. The government, which over the last few days has collected 1,400 bodies from homes and hospitals in Guayaquil, uses a website to notify individuals of corpses’ burial plots.

(AFP)