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nearby there’d be no shortage of wood,
and the closure of a massive factory
called Funeraria Flores a few years
earlier had left the town full of expert
laborers who could use the work. And,
of course, there was the steady supply
of murder victims, including four of
Carlos Sr.’s own bakery employees. The
Pachecos closed the bakery and started
knocking out coffins.
It wasn’t long before everyone else
in Jucuapa had the same idea. “We all
saw an opportunity,” says Julio Cesar,
a Funeraria Flores veteran who started
his own workshop shortly after the
Pachecos did. “It was the only thing
that those of us who had worked at the
factory knew how to do.”
The competition drove down prices
and reduced the Pachecos’ profit mar-
gins. There were better resources in the
town, and by 2016 the Pacheco family
was struggling to compete, its finances
in trouble again. Juan Carlos, who by
then had become an emergency room
doctor in the capital of San Salvador,
persuaded his brothers and father to
turn the coffin factory into a full-on
funeral parlor. “It was the obvious deci-
sion to make,” Carlos Stanley says in the
embalming room, making an incision in
the 20-year-old’s left thigh with a scalpel.
“We could make greater profit margins
on service than we ever could produc-
ing and selling coffins.” And because the
family had the best coffin suppliers in
the country to pick from, the brothers
say, it wasn’t hard to find quality.
At the beginning of 2018, Juan Carlos,
now at the head of the business, began
pushing the newly formed parlor in
directions that led to a schism in the
family. He and Carlos Stanley intend
to turn the funeral home into eastern
El Salvador’s primary embalming
facility. A national law requires all such
procedures to take place in a certified
laboratory, and the two brothers—who,
like their peers, don’t yet abide by that
law—are betting on stricter government
enforcement in the future. They expect
to spend $15,000 to $20,000 over the
next few years to build a lab that’s up
to code. “When that time comes, people
will then have to use our funeral parlor,”
Juan Carlos says. He’s also planning an

adjoining chapel where typically Catholic

mourners will be able to livestream their

vigils to relatives abroad.

Around the same time as this expan-

sion effort began, Carlos Sr. and Carlos

Humberto moved to Usulután, a city

of about 70,000 and a 40-minute drive

south, to set up another funeral par-

lor. This spared them the capital invest-

ment that Juan Carlos and Carlos Stanley

have taken on, but it placed them in one

of the region’s most dangerous spots.

The new shop, also called Funerales

Pacheco, sits at the side of a dusty road

at the edge of town. During a visit, Carlos

Humberto says about two-thirds of his

business results from violent crime and

he and his father use police, hospital,

and mortuary contacts to reach mourn-

ers before rivals can. The practice has

come to be calledmuertear(“to death”),

but the English expression would be

“ambulance chasing.” “Death here is

so prevalent, you have to find some

way to take advantage of it,” says Carlos

Humberto, who won’t say whether he

and his father pay their tipsters.

Carlos Humberto prides himself on

being the first on the scene, even when

his trips to pitch funeral services to

victims’ families bring him into con-

tact with gang members. “They have

stopped me, and they have threatened

me many times,” he says. “But it’s part

of the job, and I’m used to it by now.”

His younger brother should get that

last line inscribed on his tombstone.

Until 2010, Carlos Stanley, like the rest of

the family, knew little about the body’s

inner workings. But in the embalming

room, a dank corridor behind the coffin

showroom, he looks as if he’s never

done anything else. Once he finds the

alcohol-poisoned boy’s femoral artery,

he attaches a needle connected to a

thin transparent tube, creating a cir-

cuit to pump yellowformaldehyde

into the body and drain the blood

into a Coke bottle by his feet. Through

the sting of the formaldehyde, I can

smell what Carlos Stanley’s mother,

Rosa Elena Sanchéz Bonilla, is cook-

ing in the kitchen. Somewhere outside,

ominous classical music plays over a

tinny speaker. A woman’s voice follows

the sinister requiem.

“They’re announcing the boy’s

burial,” Juan Carlos says, poking his

head in. “You pay the shop $10, and

they make an announcement for you.”

O

n my last day with the Pachecos,

Juan Carlos and I join about

200 mourners at a funeral in Jucuapa’s

crowded municipal cemetery, a mish-

mash of decaying headstones and

tombs. The humid air smells of incense.

During the service, people clog the

paths, lean on the graves, and weep into

their handkerchiefs. It’s only the sec-

ond time I see Juan Carlos completely

silent. As the gravediggers lower a cof-

fin into the ground, his eyes well up.

The funeral, which his team has orga-

nized, is for his lifelong friend Cristian

Perdomo, who died of kidney failure.

While Carlos Stanley directs the

gravediggers a few yards away, Juan

Carlos stares blankly at the gravestones

in front of him. When he worked in the

hospital, he says, he’d often sat for

hours listening to his patients’ prob-

lems. Even in an emergency ward in a

country where murder is omnipresent,

the undercurrent of almost every com-

plaint is a paralyzing fear of mortality.

In Jucuapa the coffin trade has

become a backbone of the local

economy, offering steady employment

to hundreds of people. At both branches

of the Pacheco family business, sales

are up. Juan Carlos, quick to acknowl-

edge the irony, says he hopes things will

change. “Maybe in the future, Jucuapa

will be known for other things,” he says.

For now, though, he has no plans to

become a baker again. 

Bloomberg Businessweek March 11, 2019

“DEATH HERE IS

SO PREVALENT,

YOU HAVE TO FIND

SOME WAY TO

TAKE ADVANTAGE

OF IT”