CARACAS, Venezuela | Pulling a dead rat tied to a string, 11-year-old Jendry runs a single roller skate at his foot, between desecrated graves in the Caracas South General Cemetery.
This morbid setting strewn with human bones, ripped open coffins, he no longer really sees, he has lived there for years. Still in service, the historic Caracas cemetery with tombs dating in particular from the 19th century welcomes many destitute families without roofs who have to live with the dead, but also grave robbers.
Cooking on the graves
Jendry and his sister Wineisis, 9, who live by begging with their alcoholic and absent mother, are among these inhabitants.
Jendry’s older sister, Winifer, 17, moved with her husband Jackson, 19, and their 5-month-old daughter, in a sort of chapel with 4 graves.
“You can say that I have lived all my life here in the cemetery”, confides the young woman who can neither read nor write.
Some have set up huts around concessions, placing their mattresses on the graves or cutting the cassava on the flagstones, storing bags and belongings between the graves. A children’s pink bag imitation of a smiling “Hello Kitty” swears with the solemn character of lapidary dates.
A relative of the buried dead gets angry when she sees that Jackson and his family are using the graves “like a kitchen”. “We must respect the dead. It’s still painful for us, ”she said, indicating that the bodies of her murdered 21-year-old son and her niece who died of cancer are buried there.
A sign of the reigning anarchy, the vast majority of the graves have been desecrated or looted.
The looters are looking for jewelry, wedding rings, gold teeth … which may have been buried with the deceased.
Mystical rituals
Here lies a skull, there a broken tibia or an incomplete humerus …
One of the jewels of the cemetery, the mausoleum of the former Venezuelan President Joaquin Crespo (1841-1898), is now a palace in ruins, the small corridors are filled with debris of all kinds. A small staircase leads to a dome, regularly used by drug addicts.
The gigantic mausoleums built by the National Guard and the old police to accommodate the graves of their men have also been looted and vandalized. The funeral urns and mortuary niches were disemboweled. The basements are full of garbage and excrement. Curiously, the framed photo of a young police officer who probably died on duty is intact on the ground.
But, in addition to the “gold fever”, we also see that the looters have sometimes mystical motivations.
The bones or skulls can be sold for use in “Santeria” ceremonies, the worship of saints, close to Haitian voodoo or Brazilian candomblé. Rituals even take place on site, we thus discover an ear of corn and eggs placed on a plate as an offering.
Relatives of the buried dead are organizing to protect the graves, paying residents to watch them. Some pay in kind (package of flour or beans), others with money.
Luis, 41, tends 37 graves in exchange for food. “I take care of each of the graves, I clean them and I keep them clean, in exchange for which the families give you something on Sunday,” he explains.
AFP
Pictured: Luis Miguel Mendez (left)
Every Sunday, relatives go to the graves, sometimes around a festive picnic with music.
Some are overwhelmed by the damage. “Cursed those who loot our dead. Whoever I catch, I kill. Rats! Amen, ”someone wrote on a grave.
On several other graves, disgruntled relatives simply wrote to deter the looters: “already desecrated”.
For Luis, who served ten years in prison for drug trafficking and says he lost his home in a slum in a flood two years ago, “it’s better to sleep here than on the streets,” says he.