The smell of putrefaction mixes this Thursday afternoon with the humidity of the atmosphere around the Guayaquil morgue. The heat has evaporated the liquids from the more than 200 decomposing bodies that Forensic Medicine officials removed from a collapsed container on Wednesday and distributed in a recently repaired refrigerated warehouse. These days the institution presented a picture of horror: dismembered bodies, blood and a penetrating stench throughout the facilities. The chaos has been caused by the large number of autopsies that only four doctors have to perform, who due to the high demand can only dedicate 30 minutes to each corpse, when the ideal would be between four and six hours. This results in lost evidence and misplaced identities.
The hours pass and, outside the morgue of the most violent city in Ecuador, relatives continue waiting for news of the bodies. Some have been allowed to enter to identify the body and do the paperwork so they can remove it. Among them, María’s 16-year-old son, who was kidnapped when he was leaving school and later murdered. “I just want them to give me my son, because they don’t understand the pain this is for us,” says the heartbroken mother, crying in her sister’s arms. Family members are prepared with masks and menthol ointment for the nose. Everyone is waiting for an official to approach them to give them information. “Are they going to hand over the bodies or not?” they ask each other. They have told them yes, and they hope that at the end of the day they can do the ritual of watching over the body of their relative to help their soul detach itself from the earth.
Antonio Mayorga’s son was shot three times when they tried to rob his taxi three days ago. The bullets went straight to the kidney, the lung and an artery of the heart. The body of his son has been in the morgue ever since. “They told us that there are problems in the containers, that the corpses are in a state of putrefaction, but that today they are going to deliver them,” Antonio says hopefully. Other relatives who have been hearing the same thing for months have desperately asked to enter the containers to look for the bodies themselves, but they have not been allowed.
The National Service of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences began the transfer of at least 100 bodies to the newly repaired container on Wednesday afternoon. The bodies were placed on top of each other without much care, in black plastic bags. Some of them were broken and revealed a part of the sheathed body. According to the agency, due to the increase in criminal violence in the country, the number of unidentified corpses in the forensic center and other bodies that have not been removed by any family member has increased. According to sources consulted by Morning Express, the profiles of the abandoned corpses are usually those of homeless people or people linked to criminal gangs, whom their loved ones prefer to forget.
The burial process of these corpses must comply with a protocol with the objective of demonstrating that all possible tests have been exhausted to identify them. The bodies have to go through a necrodactyly, anthropology, and forensic odontology test, in addition to DNA collection to request a certificate from the Ministry of Public Health and authorization from the Prosecutor’s Office to bury the body. After this procedure is achieved, a cemetery must donate the space to bury the body individually, with a code that is written on the tombstone to be used in case the Prosecutor’s Office, as a result of new investigations, requires a new one. expertise and the remains have to be exhumed.
But that process has not been carried out either. The crisis in the Guayaquil morgue has been going on for several months, since the lack of personnel to deal with the increase in corpses that must undergo an autopsy became known. In fact, the opposite has happened: the death toll has increased and the bodies must be distributed among the only four medical examiners who are certified to do that work.
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