The city morgue of Guayaquil in Ecuador is so full of dead bodies that it has resorted to using refrigerated shipping containers.
Knewz.com has learned that the problem intensified when corpses accumulated and the cooling failed, immersing the facility in a miasma.
The main factor leading to this situation is prison massacres. According to the El Pais, unlike the usual protocols of storing dead bodies one-per-niche until loved ones come looking, the facility is now forced to fit two and sometimes three corpses into said niches.
Another cause is two of the three designated refrigerated containers stopped working, resulting in their occupants being crammed into the last functional container.
“The smell of death has flooded the surroundings of the Forensic Medicine facilities in Guayaquil,” the publication reported.
“Six months ago, one of the containers that housed these bodies stopped working and they were moved to the only one that was still operational,” the South American newspaper reported.
“Now, this space has become overloaded and the corpses no longer fit. The liquids produced by decay have begun to seep through the cracks.”
It goes on to narrate morgue workers picking up human body parts that had fallen out of their forensic plastic coverings and placing them in separate bags, while at the back of the container, the bodies lay stacked on top of one another.
In this container, there are said to be 200 corpses, many of them still unidentified.
One of the deceased’s family members, known only as Daniel, has been begging the morgue to return his daughter's remains.
“They don’t see our pain, we won’t even be able to hold a wake over her body, because it has been here for too long,” he said.
Daniel and others like himself have faced a slew of disappointing responses from the morgue’s employees that include: “They are not ready yet”, “Come back tomorrow” or “The corpse is lost.”
The online publication says that on June 8, one of the containers came back online, but the corpses remained stuffed into one container as the employees awaited biohazard suites.
Despite the evidence of the climbing crime rate, the government asserts crime in the country is subsiding. Statistics published by Macro Trends indicated that there has been an incremental year-on-year increase in crime between 2018 and 2020.
However, in 2021, a 100% decline was depicted.
In 2022 the country’s Ministry of Interior published a finding that homicides had reached 4,800, per Brazilian think tank, Igarape. In the next year, it nearly doubled, reaching 8,012.
The statistics also noted that 92% of the victims were male and 87% of the total deaths were fire-arm related.