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Jendry runs around on a skateboard while dragging a dead rat tied to a rope: its playground is a gigantic Caracas cemetery full of desecrated graves. Other children play with him undeterred by human bones extracted by looters.
The 11-year-old boy, who usually goes with his 9-year-old sister to order food in a nearby market, he lives with his alcoholic mother in the General Cemetery of the South. Still operational, the cemetery from the end of the 19th century and declared a National Historic Landmark in 1982It houses numerous homeless families, who must cohabit with the dead but also with grave robbers.
In one of the few graves that have not yet been outraged Her older sister, Winifer, 17, lives with her husband, Jackson, 19, and their 5-month-old daughter. “I have practically lived my whole life in the cemetery,” says this adolescent with the face of a girl who cannot read or write.
It is enough to take a few steps to witness the aftermath of the looting, aggravated in the last decade. “In one day they desecrated 22 graves,” says one worker. There are no official figures, but local media point out that more than 60% of the cemetery it has been desecrated.
Winifer and Jackson, who spent months in prison for stealing a cell phone, they live in a structure roofed with sheets of zinc and covered by metal bars, similar to a small chapel. They sleep on granite tombstones that house four dead underneath.
The desecration of the cemetery, which houses historical figures, some relocated, It arose from the “gold rush”, in the frantic search for jewels with which they buried the deceased, according to workers.
But it is also due to Santeria. Among the skeletons there are even evidences of rituals carried out in the place: dishes with corn and some eggs as an offering and bottles of alcohol. While in others they fall “They take out the dead, they even steal pottery”, justifies Jackson, “one is here and this is safe”. “You take care of things”.
It’s Sunday and salsa and reggaeton are blaring in the dangerous neighborhood that borders the cemetery. That day, Luis, 41, who lives in a space similar to Winifer and Jackson’s, which he covered with cardboard, expects more visitors. He says to take care of 37 graves, including the one you occupy with your family.
“All my graves are marked,” he explains. “One takes care of his grave, it is kept swept, washed, cleaned, and family members on Sundays come to you with two or three products” of food. “There are good weekends that I have gathered up to 20”, celebrates this man who lost his home two years ago after a downpour.
Unemployed, he searches garbage cans for food, mats, pots and toys for his son. “It is better to sleep here than on the street”says Luis, who was imprisoned for nine years for selling drugs. However, some people are upset that they feel that these makeshift residences desecrate the graves of their loved ones.
A woman named Maritza complains to Jackson when she sees kitchen utensils on the grave of a nephew killed by police officers. “I get a kitchen here, what is that? They have to respect, those deaths still hurt one ”, complains Maritza, indicating that the bodies of a son murdered at age 21, a niece who died of cancer, his mother-in-law and two other nephews victims of the violence are buried in that place.
He points out that the deterioration is years old “but now it is worse, everything is destruction.” “Damn all those who bring out our dead. Whoever catches here I kill, rats. Amen”, reads a message written with a brush on a grave. “It has already been desecrated, there is no gold,” say others.
The gigantic mausoleums of the Bolivarian National Guard (GNB) and the dissolved Caracas Metropolitan Police are examples of the devastation. To go down to the basement where the police niches are, all looted, you go through a staircase full of garbage, rubble and excrement. The smell is unbearable.
On the floor, a wood-framed portrait of a young policeman survives. The luxurious family mausoleum of the two-time president of Venezuela Joaquín Crespo (1841-1898) is in ruins. It is difficult to walk through rubble where two destroyed wooden sarcophagi with glass walls stand out, where Crespo and his wife rested.
Homeless and drug addicts climb a spiral staircase to the second floor of this architectural work, one of the most emblematic of the cemetery, whose dome stands out in the distance.
The Caracas mayor’s office did not respond in a timely manner to AFP’s request for a comment on the cemetery situation. But Luis, who sleeps on 9 corpses, says that there is only one way to prevent desecration: “He who wants to have his dead insurance has to pay.”
