the edge of the road and put black tape over the telephone number on the side of his taxi. With a deliberate show, he folded a piece of white paper and fixed this over his number plates. He knew the gangs would take these details and he did not want them to visit his home and see that he had a wife and child.
Getting back in, he insisted I lower my window. ‘If they can’t see in, then they will think we are the other gang,’ he said. ‘Then they’ll open fire.’ He was taking no chances.
By the time we reached the crime scene, the light was fast departing, and the coroner’s wagon had taken the bodies away. The blood still stained that sandy road, and there was a small piece of intestine, blown out of one of the girl’s backs, lying obscenely in the middle of the track. I pushed it with my foot and watched it tremble in the electric light. Perhaps the coroner was too busy to clean up. After all, in the last three years there had been over 6,000 homicide autopsies carried out here in San Pedro, compared to just sixty-two natural death autopsies.17
I walked over to a huddle of people sitting back from the road. The mild drama of a Brazilian soap opera was playing out on a square television hanging outside a Portakabin. A fire blazed in an oil drum; the shifting of car headlights illuminated the area and cast dancing shadows. A man in a white England football shirt turned to me.
‘Three women?’ he said. ‘Yes – I heard fifteen gunshots and saw them fall. They lay there for about fifteen minutes before the police arrived, but by then they had been dead for fifteen minutes.’
His Spanish was fast, and because he repeated the word fifteen I was confused.
‘The journalists were here before the forensics arrived,’ he said, as if that made it clearer, and a fat woman beside him started to scream. I had no idea why.
‘The gangs do this as a sort of theatre,’ the man in the football shirt was saying. ‘They pick where they want the bodies to lie, they leave the gun-shells. They don’t care. We have piles of dead bodies here, and the police say they investigate them, but no one gets caught. No one goes to jail.’
The bullets were 9mm. ‘Claro’. Of course. It’s the gun of choice for the feared Calle 18 gang, who run these streets. And with that, he had nothing more to say and walked back into the shadows by his hut. When I approached others they too edged into the dark. The gangs were always here watching. This was just how it was. The killings had brought powerlessness, despair and, ultimately, silence.
Beside us, up a slope, stood a raised breezeblock hut. The lights spilling from the windows captured those inside in silhouette, and then, suddenly, their voices began to lift. They were evangelical Christians. In all of this, perhaps, God was the only one worth speaking to. Below, a line of tied, tired horses snorted in the night, startled at the noise. The cries of those few believers drifted upwards to the speckled sky. And out there, out in the darkness and in an even greater silence, lay three more bodies in a San Pedro municipal refrigeration unit.
Outside the morgue a man in short sleeves and a pair of stained trousers sat and waited and sucked on a bag of fizzy drink through a bent straw. At this time, the sun was already hard on your face, and it would be hours before the heat lessened. The passing cars kicked up small whirls of dust. No one spoke.
Beside him a coffin was propped open with a stick. It lay empty, but he remained hopeful. A quick burial cost about 2,500 lempiras – $120 – and he looked at the hunched relatives leaving the morgue, with their sallow faces and hurting eyes, and sucked on his straw.
He was from Funeraria San Jose, and was just one of the many morticians who came daily to this, the busiest morgue in the world. It would not be long before he got a customer. His name was Marco Antonio Ramos. At fifty-three, he hadn’t thought he would be doing this, but work is work, and this was good work. He had sold six coffins last month alone.
I asked him why he did it.
‘Money. I found a way through life with these coffins,’ he said, his voice light.
‘Do you prepare the bodies for burial?’
‘So the relatives can open up the lids and say goodbye to their loved ones – those whose faces are still there.’ There are at least ten funeral homes here in San Pedro, and yet business is still good. Just as the lure of death had brought Marco to these gates, so it had brought me – I had come to see how the municipal morgue could cope with so many gun murders.
There was shouting for people from the gate.
‘Is there anyone from Baracoa here?’ the call went out.
A hunched, fat woman went in, her back contorted, the knowledge of what lay on the other side heavy upon her. Here they got as many as thirty bodies a day; most had died violently. I turned and walked towards the visitor’s entrance, the only person to go through those gates that morning with neither tearful nor lifeless eyes.
Inside, Dr Hector Hernandez greeted me. He was the director of this morgue, a tidy man with grey hair and a patient calm, exact and professional. He led me into a large and empty lecture theatre. The walls were peeling, and the place felt like no one had taught here for years. He pointed towards a Formica table and pulled over a decaying chair. Hector’s face seemed melted with tiredness. He has a team of 146, he began. Among them are sixty-eight medics, two dental analysts, four toxicologists, two microbiologists and one psychiatrist.
A psychiatrist? I stopped him.
‘The morgue is not just for the dead,’ he explained. What the gangs do to their victims is sometimes so vicious that their markings on the bodies leave much deeper markings on the minds of those who are left behind. After all, the killers have a method. They almost always end it with a shot to the head – they prefer a 9mm to do this – but they torture their victims first. ‘Violence here is intimate, but the gun sends them to the other side,’ he said.
Hector sighed when I asked him if this daily arrival of bodies had affected his morale. He was resigned to it.
‘In ten years, between 2003 and 2013, we had over 10,000 autopsies; 9,400 of them did not result in an investigation. For me, this is the hardest: this impunity. Nothing has been investigated.’
Right now he had 68 bodies in storage; 48 of them being matched for DNA, the other 20 were unknown. Most had died prematurely and violently.
‘After thirty days if no one claims a body, we bury them anonymously,’ he said. Last year, 120 people were interred in this way, the majority of them men between eighteen and thirty. Then I asked, in the sixteen years he had worked there, what had stayed with him, what memory of all of this violence had struck him the most.
He sucked in a breath. The murder of an entire family is hard, he said, his voice measured and exact. Like the time he saw a dead mother still holding her three children tight in her arms. The gangs had kicked down the bathroom door and killed them as one. Then there are the others. In this city these are the bodies that come packaged – trussed up in grey sacks. They die painfully, he told me, their legs tied up against their backs, their faces bruised, their teeth missing. They once found twenty-six bodies in sacks like this in a field: a grim harvest.
Suddenly, as if this was too painful a memory to dwell on, he rose, straightened his tie and beckoned me to follow. We walked through swinging double doors and out into the dissecting room. It was a sudden shift from talking about death to seeing it.
The tiles on the floor
