Bloomberg Businessweek

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Bloomberg Businessweek March 11, 2019

*FIGURES DERIVED FROM INTENTIONAL RATES AND POPULATION ESTIMATES; NATIONS WITH FEWERTHAN 50 HOMICIDES HAVE BEEN EXCLUDED; DATA: UNITED NATIONS, WORLD BANK

0 homicides per 100k people 10 20 30 40

Belize

HOW NATIONAL HOMICIDE RATES COMPARE

South Africa

Brazil

Guatemala

Bahamas

Mexico Colombia

Dominican

Republic

India

Philippines

Russia

U.S.

Puerto Rico

Guyana

Central African

Republic

J

uan Carlos Pacheco and his brother

Carlos Stanley begin, as always, by

asking the dead man for permission. In

the living room of a modest house in

eastern El Salvador, Juan Carlos pulls a

surgical mask over his face and mouths

the plea soundlessly from behind its

pleats.Please let me prepare you, so

your family can see you one more time

before you go.

The room is murky and hot. The

concrete walls are bare except for

three portraits, each of a different girl

in a brightly colored graduation gown.

Worn blue curtains cover the windows,

and the brothers’ shoes squeak on the

cement floor. Carlos Stanley is built like

a bull, with dark hair, a bulging neck,

and thighs that make his jeans look

like sausage casings. Juan Carlos is of a

similar height but less brawny, with a

shaved head, thick black glasses, and

a jagged scar that runs diagonally

across his face, a childhoodsouvenir

from a vicious dog.

As a thunderstorm cracks and

rumbles outside, both men stand for

a moment, looking at the body. The

light of Carlos Stanley’s smartphone,

balanced on the open lid of the simple

brown coffin, illuminates a bullet-

riddled face and black hair. A bulb

flickering on the ceiling shines into a

gaping red hole in the corpse’s chest.

Neither Pacheco seems fazed by the

smell, which hangs heavy in the air like

the humid funk of a meat locker. The

brothers listen to the sobbing of rela-

tives waiting beyond the door and the

rain beating against the windowpanes.

The Pachecos are undertakers work-

ing in El Salvador, a country with one

of the world’s highest murder rates.

Together they’ve embalmed more

than 500 bodies in less than two years.

They’ve sewn together dismembered

limbs, reconstructed caved-in heads

with inflatable plastic balls, and

embalmed cadavers so putrefied that

their flesh appeared to be melting. But

although the Pachecos are relatively

new to the funeral business, they grew

up around death. They’re from Jucuapa,

a small city of about 18,000 people and

about 30 coffin factories. Manufacturing

the “wooden pajamas,” as some locals

call them, has become such big business

in Jucuapa that families have abandoned

their bakeries, butcher shops, and sugar

cane fields to enter the funeral industry.

The corpse lying in the living room

has become almost normal for people

like the Pachecos. Today’s body used to

be Guillermo Gómez Quintanilla, who

was returning home from his girlfriend’s

house when gang members gunned him

down in Jucuapa’s Santa Fidelia neigh-

borhood. Police officers, uncertain

whether the 22-year-old was connected

to a rival gang, are still investigating,

according to local news reports.

The brothers prepare Gómez’s

remains for three hours, stitching up the

bullet holes, pumping in formaldehyde,

hiding the bruising with makeup, and

dressing him in his favorite clothes. They

charge a little more than $100 for the ser-

vice. When they’re done, Stanley invites

the relatives into the room to begin the

24-hour wake. Gómez’s mother is among

the first to enter. As she sidles up to the

coffin, she looks at her son’s face, now

eerily revitalized by the makeup, and col-

lapses into Juan Carlos’s arms.

J

ucuapa is hemmed in on all sides by

jungle and hills. The drive to a local

coffin factory on the city’s outskirts

runs past neat detached houses with

tidy gardens, crowded market squares,

children playing soccer, and people

idling on park benches. “You wouldn’t

have been able to go where we are

about to go,” Juan Carlos says. “There

were gangs everywhere.”

“Gangs everywhere” remains a

fact of life throughout El Salvador,

a country of 6 million people where

2.5 million live in poverty and the

defense ministry estimates that about

500,000 are somehow connected to

gang activity. The major rival groups,

Barrio 18 and MS-13, have U.S. origins.

Refugees founded them to survive

in the tougher parts of Los Angeles

around the peak of the Salvadoran civil

war, when El Salvador’s repressive gov-

ernment targeted citizens using para-

military death squads funded partly

with tens of millions of dollars from

the Carter and Reagan administrations.

The gangs returned to El Salvador

in the early 1990s, around the time the

Pacheco brothers were born, after the

Clinton administration implemented

mass deportations. Within a decade

they’d become one of their home

country’s biggest problems. “When

you grow up in a poor area, sometimes

you have no other option but to join a

gang,” says Dennis, a funeral worker and

former MS-13 member who asked not to

be identified by his last name for fear of

reprisals. “It’s up to the state to help us

find better options.”

The Roman Catholic Church, with

quiet support from the Salvadoran

government, negotiated a truce between

the two gangs in 2012, reducing the

violence drastically for more than a

year, from about 14 murders a day

nationwide to between five and six.

Latin American and Caribbean nations Other nations Circle size indicates number of homicides* in 2016