Anguished Mourners Beg for Answers After Jail Fire in Venezuela

VALENCIA, Venezuela — The cemetery did not look or smell like a peaceful resting ground for the dead. It felt more like a mass grave, populated with white crosses, buzzing flies, dirt piles and mourners, some wailing, “Why, why?”

At least 40 wooden coffins, according to workers, were interred at the cemetery on the outskirts of the industrial city of Valencia in Carabobo state on Friday in hastily organized funerals for victims of one of Venezuela’s most horrific jail fires.

There were no priests, no religious rituals, few comforting words from Venezuelan officials, who have yet to explain how such carnage could have happened. President Nicolás Maduro has not even mentioned it.

Anguished relatives conducted their own makeshift funerals, which were staggered through the day. Cemetery workers and family members lowered coffins three-deep into trenches lined with gray cinder blocks and brown bricks, covering each coffin with concrete like a layer cake.

At least 68 people — mostly prisoners but some relatives who had been visiting — died in the police jailhouse fire, which had started as a party run by inmate gangs that got out of control. Precisely who set the fire remains unclear. Many victims, some barely out of their teens, burned or asphyxiated. Others showed signs that they had been beaten.

Family members who rushed to the overcrowded jail at news of the fire Thursday were sprayed with tear gas by security forces, adding outrage to the inexplicable.

By late afternoon Friday, the cemetery was a hodgepodge of grief, rage and the smell of putrefying bodies.

Neillin Villegas, 20, burned to death. She had been visiting her jailed brother, Angelo Villegas, who also died. Her simple thin-wood coffin, surrounded by flies, was carried by relatives and left in the middle of the cemetery, close to trenches waiting to be filled.

Not even her own grandmother could breathe without covering her nose.

Beside her, a small boy, one of Neillin’s two young children, played with the dirt. “Is Neillin dead?” he asked. “Yes,” answered the grandmother.

She was buried on top of other two coffins. Men wearing jeans and boots, sweating, grabbed her coffin with two ropes to lower it.

“Who will I take to parties now?” cried a mourner. “It’s not fair! No one told us she was dead. I couldn’t see her. God, why?”

The men who had lowered Villegas’ coffin filled two buckets with concrete. They used a spatula to spread it on top.

“She is the last one that fits here,” said one man, who called himself Pepe. “A couple more and we can go home and eat.”

Pepe said he had buried 28 people Friday.

He had a small sheet of paper with names written in pen with him. “She is the only woman I have here,” he said.

Closer to the entrance, family and friends of Eduardo Hernández, 20, gathered around his grave as it was sealed with concrete by a man wearing a T-shirt with the name of Gov. Rafael Lacava of Carabobo state, one of the few officials who expressed remorse over the fire and promised an investigation.

Hernández’s mother, Jennifer Petit, 40, described him as a soccer lover and a good student. But somewhere along the way, he committed a crime and ended up in a small jail cell with 10 others.

“I received a call from a friend who said something was happening at the police station,” Petit said. “I went there and saw firemen and many mothers asking for answers.” Like many, she had to wait until her name was called by a policewoman.

She identified her son on the floor, his eyes closed, shirtless, bruises on his back, Petit said, and she concluded that the police must have killed him.

“We want justice,” she said. “We want this to be shown to the world. This is how they treat people in Venezuela.”

A bus blaring salsa music awaited more than 50 people who had come to say goodbye to Hernández. As many started to walk down the hill where he now rests, an aunt painted his name on a white cross with black paint. “Tell them to wait for me,” she yelled to the others boarding the bus, “I have to finish this, I cannot leave him nameless.”

A young girl, pregnant, approached her and admired the cross. “Eduardo Hernández,” she said to herself in a very soft voice, “rest in peace papi.”