Caracas Chronicles

Spain’s La Razón publishes the kind of detail-oriented, intensely observed report on Caracas’s Bello Monte morgue that Venezuelan newspapers – for reasons that continue to baffle me –  seem plainly unable to produce. The report quotes a former morgue director saying:

"My colleagues are overwhelmed. When I left Bello Monte we were 13 pathologists, by now there are five left. There are six tables in the autopsy room, and 60 refrigerated niches, plus a refrigerated room where we have to pile up the bodies on stretchers or anywhere else we’re able. The morgue is the reflection of Venezuela, of a wave of violence you can’t hide. There’s one pathologist working on Saturdays and another on Sunday. That’s enough to do 12 autopsies per day, but some days we get up to 60 bodies, and of course the families want to bury their dead the same day they’re brought here."

If you can read Spanish, it’s well worth your time.