The missing bodies of Guayaquil
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 9 July 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In March and April, Guayaquil in Ecuador was the epicentre of the Covid pandemic in Latin America. The city’s health services began to collapse fast – hospitals, cemeteries and morgues were overwhelmed. As the bodies of the dead were not collected, hundreds of desperate families kept the remains of their loved ones at home, or deposited them on the streets. Eventually they were picked up. But in the chaos, some corpses went missing.
For Assignment, Mike Lanchin teams up with Guayaquil journalist Blanca Moncada, to follow the story of one woman in her dramatic search for the body of her late husband.
(Image: Funeral workers with a coffin in the back of a pick-up truck outside Los Ceibos hospital in Guayaquil. Credit: Reuters/Santiago Arcos)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Combe is all about people and it's all about surprising stories. |
| 0:04.0 | It's all about finding out what's really going on and it's all about Africa. |
| 0:08.0 | It's a brand new podcast from the BBC World Service and you can find it by searching for Vogue Home, wherever you got this |
| 0:14.2 | podcast. |
| 0:15.2 | Hello I'm Mike Lanchin. |
| 0:18.2 | Welcome to this assignment podcast from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:21.8 | Now what you're about to hear is an unsettling story |
| 0:25.7 | from the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in South America. When the virus |
| 0:31.2 | struck Ecuador's largest city Guayakil earlier this year, its entire health system |
| 0:37.2 | literally collapsed. Hospitals turned patients away, bodies were left unburied at home or in the streets, and in the mayhem the remains |
| 0:46.5 | of some of those who died were lost. |
| 0:49.9 | Now with quarantine over in Ecuador, the search is on for the missing bodies of Guayakil. |
| 0:57.0 | When you're doing a sirches a lot of the moorte, when you are so close |
| 1:05.0 | are so close that you can smell death and you can feel it firsthand, |
| 1:10.0 | that's when you really understand the scale of what's happening in your own city |
| 1:15.6 | and it's not something you can forget so easily. |
| 1:18.8 | This is Blanco Moncada, a journalist who lives and works in Guayakil. During March and April, Ecuador's largest |
| 1:27.6 | city became the epicenter of Latin America's COVID-19 pandemic. |
| 1:35.0 | In those two months more than 10,000 people died in the province that includes Guayakil. |
| 1:41.0 | The city's hospitals, cemeteries, morgues, the entire health system collapsed |
| 1:46.7 | under the weight of the virus. And Guayakil's normally bustling streets resembled scenes from a dystopian horror movie. |
| 1:57.6 | No one takes any notice of them, says this man, pointing at a coffin left by the roadside. |
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