Guatemala: Heartbreak and Hope

Death draws crowds.

Some Guatemalan parents bring children, even babies, to watch morgue workers collect bloody bodies. Nobody seems bothered when ice cream vendors push their carts up at a traffic fatality or funeral and start ringing their bells.

Dark humor abounds.

At the death cave where the bodies of six people waited, a young man amused friends by peeling off a narrow strip of crime scene tape. He pulled the plastic ribbon between his teeth, like dental floss.

Reporters threw pebbles at detectives’ backs. Laughter and jokes competed with grieving.

There also is little appreciation for protecting evidence.

Guatemalan police and prosecutors have only recently begun using blood spatters, bullet fragments and fingerprints to build cases.

“Here we never, ever worked with any kind of evidence at all,” said Dr. Marco Auerilio Peneda Colon, a dentist who oversees the nation’s largest crime lab.

“If you can’t resolve a case in three days here, forget it. In seven or eight years, you are never going to resolve it.”

As crime scene investigators arrived at the cave, a brace of bomberos, Guatemala’s volunteer firefighters, were kneeling near the bodies, posing.

A few paces away, a television reporter delivered a standup dispatch. When his report aired on the evening news, the bomberos were framed in the background, gravely hovering over the dead.

Juan Canesses, a lead crime scene investigator, emptied the area of journalists and firefighters.

“Every scene, every body, I always say to my people, ‘Work the scene as if it is one of your own family. Justice begins here,’” he said.

The six victims were carried out one at a time. The pregnant woman was first, placed in the back of a pickup truck going to the morgue.

Reporters pressed in, ignoring the crime scene tape. Others in the crowd followed. People who knew the dead sobbed and called their names. Others were strangers, their eyes roaming over the broken bodies.

“Here we have a culture of the cadaver,” said Jorge Donado, one of the investigating prosecutors. “Everybody wants to come and see.”