Sonia Bermúdez takes the fingerprints of the body of Eduardo Sánchez, a Venezuelan man who died in the Colombian city of Maicao on August 29. | MANUEL RUEDA
La mujer que entierra a los migrantes venezolanos que mueren en Colombia from HAROL on Vimeo.
Under the blazing sun of the north coast of Colombia, a Venezuelan family says goodbye to her father between sobs and romantic music that sounds from a cell phone.
Eduardo Sánchez died in Colombia on July 31 in an apparent murder. But the body was almost a month in a morgue because his family did not have enough money to bury him or take him to his native country.
Sanchez was finally buried on August 28 in Gente Como Uno, a humble cemetery of sandy soils and cement vaults located on the outskirts of the city of Riohacha, in northern Colombia.
The cemetery belongs to Sonia Bermúdez, a 64-year-old medical examiner who has fought for decades to give dignified burial to those who, literally, have nowhere to fall dead.
For many families of Venezuelan migrants who now flee their country and struggle to survive in Colombia, Bermúdez and his cemetery are an unexpected ally in exile.
"I feel calm and I am happy to have my son here," says Magaly Valbuena, the mother of the late Eduardo Sánchez. "I know I can come back here for her bones, when Sonia tells me it's time to get them out."
Dying in poverty
According to figures from the Colombian Legal Medicine Unit, 27 Venezuelans died in 2017 in La Guajira, the border province of Colombia where the Bermúdez cemetery is located.
In the first four months of this year, Legal Medicine counted 18 more Venezuelans dead in La Guajira.
Many Venezuelans who die, according to Bermúdez, do so in poverty.
When families meet me, they are in a very precarious situation, "he says." I have also had to bury children who come here to the hospital with malnutrition and do not survive. "
Sanchez's family says his decedent was found dead in the border city of Maicao, where he worked as a street vendor.
But his face was burned and disfigured and had to be transferred by police to Barranquilla, a city five hours away where an autopsy was done to determine the causes of his death. The authorities will take months to give a final report.
What followed for the family were several days of anguish in which they went to at least five institutions to find resources with which to bury the dead.
"We went to the consulate of Venezuela and they told us they did not have the funds to repatriate him," says Valbuena, Sanchez's mother. "In the town hall they offered us a coffin, but not a space to bury it," he says.
After several days of racing through government offices, Valbuena met with Bermúdez, who managed the transfer of the body to Riohacha and buried him in his cemetery without charging a burden on the family.
"All the same"
Bermúdez says that this year he has already buried 30 Venezuelans whose families have no way to pay for a funeral.
"Death does not care if you are from Colombia or Venezuela," says Bermúdez. "Everyone at the time of death should be the same."
And Bermúdez is not only dedicated to bury Venezuelans.
The mother of seven children says that her work with the dead began in the 80s, when she worked doing autopsies in the Legal Medicine Unit of La Guajira.
At that time, corpses of people living on the street that nobody claimed, as well as disfigured bodies of victims of the internal conflict in Colombia who were unrecognizable, arrived at the morgue in Riohacha.
Bermúdez says that, in general, the authorities disposed of these bodies in a common grave, where they were buried naked and without coffins. Occasionally their faces were covered with a bag.
"It seemed very unfair to me how these people were buried," says the coroner. "And I was wondering why the rich were given a decent burial and the poor were not."
Then Bermudez began the work that has marked his life. With his own shovel he dug tombs for the unclaimed dead of his city in an empty lot that belonged to the municipality. That arid lot frequented only by goats became over the years in the cemetery People As One.
"Initially, he buried the dead on the ground and then exhumed them," explains Bermudez. "But since 2007 I started building vaults."
Bermúdez estimates that in the last 30 years he has buried some 600 people in his private cemetery.
It is an arduous job that she has
he played almost all the time alone and with his own money, but he says that it is a job that gives him satisfaction, because it helps him "to fulfill the law of God."
Recognition
Bermúdez has received public recognition for his work and UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, donated cement and bricks to the forensic doctor to add more vaults to his cemetery.
According to Federico Sersale, the head of UNHCR for La Guajira, the agency does not normally watch over the rights of the dead. But they saw the need to do it here because no other organization was addressing the issue.