Between March and April 2020, more than 15,000 people died in Guayaquil during the first and deadliest wave of covid-19 in Latin America. The pandemic had taken by storm the second most populous city in Ecuador and its authorities, who reacted too late. The images of bodies in the streets, the desperate requests of people to remove the deceased from their homes, the total collapse of the city’s health and funeral systems were, for the rest of the continent, the first indications of the size of a pandemic that had not yet fully settled in the region.
One morning at the beginning of April 2020, the editorial director of GK, Isabela Ponce, received a call for help that said: help us to give us the bodies of our relatives. After the publication of a first reportSome corpses appeared in the Guasmo Sur hospital in Guayaquil. But not all. It was the first time that an indication of missing bodies had emerged. What was impossible to imagine is that the list would grow and grow.
When the dust of the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic settled, the count of those who did not appear amounted to more than a hundred corpses, which were lost in morgues, funeral homes and hospitals. In the maelstrom of those days, people who considered themselves dead appeared. A woman got out of a van from a public hospital and entered the house where they not only mourned her, but where they kept some ashes as if they were theirs. A case similar to the story of Belén, which appears in this documentary report.
Those who do not appear is the story of five women who, for more than a year, have searched for their loved ones, whose bodies were lost due to the negligence of a state that revealed itself incapable of containing the tragedy. Today, dozens of bodies remain unidentified.
This audiovisual production by GK, made with the support of EL PAÍS América and the Pulitzer Center, tells through recent interviews, filming of the moment and first-person accounts the search for those families who have not been able to close their grief, while reconstructing the lack of control and fear that was experienced in those days and the failed response of institutions. The story of these five women also tells the story of dozens of families who continue to search.
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