More than 200 rotting corpses of murdered people, many of them unidentified and others who have not been claimed by their families, have collapsed the morgue of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s economic engine. This is corroborated by three sources other than Morning Express, which has also documented with photographs the authorities’ operation to remedy this crisis. The smell of death has flooded the surroundings of the Forensic Medicine facilities in the city of Ecuador with the highest number of homicides. Six months ago, one of the containers that housed these bodies stopped working and they were moved to the only one that was still operational. Now, this space has become overloaded and the corpses no longer fit. The liquids of decomposition have begun to seep through the cracks.
At the door of the container, officials have collected pieces of bodies that have come out of the forensic covers and have stored them in bags. They have used light towers to illuminate the bottom of the warehouse, where arms, heads and loose trunks were piled up. The family members are the ones who suffer from the institutional inability to care for the corpses of their loved ones. Daniel has been asking the institution for months to return the body of his cruelly murdered daughter. Her body came in for an autopsy and she still hasn’t come out. “They don’t see our pain, we won’t even be able to watch over her body, because the girl has been here for too long,” says the father. Officials hold off other relatives from handing over the bodies: “they are not ready yet,” “come back tomorrow.” And when they are tired of lying, they have told them the truth: “The corpse is lost.” As? Where have they been lost? The bodies are lost in the same place where the State keeps them, where evidence is sought to solve the causes of the deaths.
So far this year, more than 1,300 crimes have been recorded in Guayaquil, but those from many more places reach those laboratories. Here the bodies of those shot, asphyxiated and mutilated from Durán, Posorja, Playas, Tenguel, Samborondón and Daule, nearby places, are reviewed. When the medical examiner finishes the autopsy, the bodies are stored individually in a cold room, which has the capacity to store 15 bodies, and there they wait until the relatives pick them up. However, prison massacres began to accumulate parts of charred human bodies in the morgue facilities without being able to be identified. And instead of storing one corpse, two or even three bodies are squeezed into each chamber.
The bodies have continued to pile up with the increase in violence. The state of decomposition of many is so advanced that fingerprints cannot be obtained, so to determine their identity, genetic profiles and a family member are needed to compare them. But since many have not been claimed by anyone, the bodies classified as NN (unidentified) began to fill two containers of 12 meters each, the same ones that were provisionally enabled to preserve the bodies due to Covid-19 in the first months of the pandemic. Six months ago, however, one of these conservation sites was damaged. According to the sources consulted, there are around two hundred bodies rotting in the only container available.
The Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences Service, responsible for the administration of the morgues, referred to the crisis through a statement in which it stated that on June 8, one of the damaged refrigerators was put into operation. But the bodies have not yet been able to be transferred because they have not given the staff the necessary biosafety equipment to avoid diseases resulting from the decomposition of the corpses, making it impossible for them to enter the container, despite the desperation of the authorities to solve the crisis.
Despite the figures shown by the Government that violence has been reduced, the National Legal Medicine Service recognizes that due to the increase in criminal violence in the country there is a greater number of NN corpses. That is, bodies that have not been identified or removed by their relatives. The number of forensic doctors has not increased despite the high demand for autopsies. The bodies arrive in dozens every day at the forensic center, where only four carry out all the work. They must attend to more than 15 corpses in an eight-hour day, when the protocol estimates that the review procedure, taking photographs and expert samples can take between three and six hours for each body. Now, doctors can’t take more than 30 minutes.
The situation of the morgue is critical, according to testimonies. The evidence that can be collected from the corpses is lost due to the urgency with which autopsies are performed. There are shot corpses that, when they have reached the doctors’ table, cannot be determined which is the entry or exit hole because the maggots have eaten the edges of the indentations caused by the projectiles. The most difficult thing is to be certain of a corpse killed by strangulation or suicide by hanging, since the marks are erased when the body begins to decompose. Then the meaning of the crime changes.
Amidst the shot and stabbed corpses in the overflowing morgue, there are also the bodies of women victims of femicide, losing evidence in the wait. In a fresh body, nail swabs can be taken to collect cells that allow experts to identify the alleged aggressor, but if the body arrives in a state of putrefaction, the nails fall off. Nor can samples of vaginal fluid be taken in the case of rape, which is an aggravating factor in the event of a sentence against the aggressor. The Government, however, assures that femicides have also decreased by 17%.
As Wednesday afternoon fell, the Forensic Medicine Service set up an operation to remove the bodies from the container. Now the staff had biosafety protective equipment. Between two and up to three people moved the black bags from the collapsed container to transfer it to the newly enabled warehouse. The morgue crisis, however, remains intact.
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