Guatemala: Heartbreak and Hope

Slap. Scrape. Slap. Scrap.

The trowel moved quickly in the mason’s hands, sealing Jairo Borreyo into his tomb.  It took only minutes.

Each day brings hasty funerals for people who fall to gangs and narcotrafficking.

Borreyo, 22, was shot dead selling candy to passengers on a bus. The killer was avenging a cousin’s gangrelated death, police said. His bullets also claimed a bystander, a young man seated in the wrong place.

Borreyo was buried the next day at the Verbena cemetery, a collection of crypt galleries for the city’s poor and middle class. Tombs honeycomb the walls of tall, white adobe buildings festooned with wreaths of dead flowers.

The burial was quickly arranged in this place where the dead usually aren’t embalmed. The funeral party included his family, tattooed gang friends and solvent-sniffing drug addicts.

In death, as in life, people at the bottom of Guatemala’s social structure wait on others.

Borreyo’s mourners stood by his coffin for more than an hour, swarmed by biting flies and dust devils carrying bits of garbage.

They spent the hours before the funeral gathered near his brown wooden casket as it sat on a stage at a community center in another part of town.

They talked about his battles with drugs, street crime and faith. Less than a year before, Borreyo buried his girlfriend, who was murdered while pregnant with his child.

He cycled in and out of gang life. By most accounts he’d found Jesus — one foot in an evangelical church, the other in the streets.

Juan Carlos Lopez, 27, clutched a Bible in one hand and with the other stroked a photo of Borreyo taped on the coffin lid. The portrait was distorted and out of focus.

Lopez’s face has gang tattoos, a mix of Roman numerals and Arabic numbers that advertise his affiliation with 18th Street, South Side.

Lopez said he spent nine years with Borreyo, sharing the same drugs, grimy apartments and lack of opportunity.

“He was my family. I appreciated him. I miss him a lot,” he said, grinding tears from his eyes with a meaty fist.

A dozen young men and women, all Borreyo’s street friends, rested on mats strewn along one wall. Most were getting high on fumes from rags soaked in paint solvent.

A boy, 12, shambled about in a stupor. He trailed the stench of chemicals and unwashed clothes. The stink mixed with the scent of death rising from Borreyo’s coffin. The same smells hung over the cemetery.

The solvent addicts made a show of trying not to use their drugs, but gave in as the minutes ticked by. They pulled out small bottles of sweet-smelling liquid, soaked their rags and began sucking fumes.

Borreyo’s funeral procession moved in fits and starts down the dirt path leading to his crypt.

Funerals for three other people came first. Each ceremony was accompanied by the same dirge played over and over by a man with a trumpet. He couldn’t be hired for Borreyo’s funeral.

Someone there for Borreyo found two mariachi players carrying battered guitars. Their song dueled with the trumpeter’s dirge.

Finally it was Borreyo’s turn.

Wails of grief soared as workers used a forklift to raise his coffin to the opening of crypt 4802. Pallbearers slid him inside. The mourners wept as workmen moved in to seal him off from the world.

It took 3½ minutes to close Borreyo’s crypt with red bricks and plaster. In another eight minutes, the tomb’s entrance was smoothed over with adobe.

There was no priest. Almost in afterthought, one of Borreyo’s friends said a few words about faith in God’s mercy.

By then, the mourners were moving away, ears ringing with the sounds of weeping and the steady slap of the workman’s trowel.

Such funerals are why Carlos Toledo dedicates his life to trying to save Guatemala’s youth.

A 1991 winner of the Reebok Human Rights Award, Toledo runs Nuestros Derechos, or Our Rights. The organization provides children and young adults with food, clothing, legal help and shelter.

At the start of the year, he was helping a boy, 12, who is feral because his mother abandoned him in favor of her addictions.

The boy is friendly and likes nothing better than having somebody read him the newspaper. He can’t read.

Also living at Nuestros Derechos was a girl, about 14. She wears her bangs long to cover the dead eye where her grandmother stabbed her with a needle. The grandmother was punishing her after learning the girl was sexually molested by a relative.

Punishing victims, particularly when they are poor, has been Guatemala’s way for years, said Marco Antonio Castillo of Grupo Ceiba, which helps people living in the tough El Limon neighborhood.

“In the ’80s, if you were dead, it was assessed you were a guerilla,” Castillo said. “Today, if you die, you are assessed a victim of drug trafficking.”

Drug trafficking is responsible for an avalanche of violence, but Castillo suspects it also makes a convenient cover for killings that border on social cleansing.

It’s all about shifting blame. Name the problem, ignore the truth.

An estimated 6 million people in the U.S. reportedly used cocaine within the past year.

Toledo asks if people in the U.S. understand how their illegal drug use makes them appear elsewhere.

From Guatemala, he said, it seems that America’s drug war is all spin control.

How is it possible for tons of dope to slip across U.S. borders each year?

Why does the U.S. put so much energy into chasing drug traffickers abroad when the world’s largest market for illegal drugs is within its own borders?

Why are so many Americans using?

“The U.S. is a first-world country,” he said. “But with all the problems it has with drugs, it is also a Third World country.”