LIMA, Peru – Every day, Joselyn García lights two red candles in front of a marble urn that his mother’s ashes in the living room of his wooden space north of the capital of Peru.
She tells her mom how much she misses everyone and tells the most recent circle of family occasions: the state of Garcia’s online clothing business and how others handle the lockdown.
“It’s a great relief,” says Garcia, 25, daughter of Maria Cochaston, who worked cleaning the offices of Peru’s Ministry of Economy before contracting the new coronavirus.
Bury a culture for both the Inca indigenous culture of Peru and for the Spaniards who colonized the country, and millions of Peruvians visited the graves of their enjoyed at least once a year, much more often, to eat and drink and pay homage to the deceased on the Day of the Dead every November.
With the advent of the pandemic, this culture suffered a blow.To prevent infection and save the area in the capital’s overcrowded cemeteries, others began to incinerate the dead, essentially turning the rites and cultures surrounding death in the country.
“This is unprecedented,” said Christopher Heaney, a professor of history and inescap funeral rites at Penn State University.
The Culture of the Day of the Dead is repeating itself, in a tiny way throughout Lima, in the shrines that other people build inside their homes, said Adam Warren, a medical expert in Peru at the University of Washington.
According to ministry of fitness officials, at least 4,686 coronavirus patients were incinerated in Peru between March and mid-August, representing approximately 20% of the country’s 25,000 coronavirus deaths.
In March, Peru ordered the cremation of all coronavirus sufferers, one of the strictest regulations in the region, to prevent others from getting inflamed by contact with bodies.Other countries, such as Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Ecuador, allowed it.burials, already at the end of April, Peru softened the rule a little, allowing funerals, but no more than five mourners.
However, many families complained that hospitals insisted on cremation anyway.
When Cochachón died on May 24, Garcia said, hospital officials said cremation was mandatory to prevent infection of the living.
His mother’s ashes were delivered several weeks later.Garcia remains convinced that he may have buried his mother as he wanted, in a white coffin.
He said he dreams that his mother will regret his cremation.
Along with the cremations, burials continued, with nearly two hundred deaths in line with the day due to an infection rate that remains one of the world’s.Many families have to look for positions in economic and remote cemeteries on the outskirts of Lima.
Rolando Yarlequé placed the urn containing the ashes of his wife, María Carmen, 68, next to his bed in the small room they had both rented in combination in the Ciudad de Dios district southeast of Lima.
Yarlequé, a 62-year-old evangelical Christian, says he is saving the two hundred dollars he will want to bury his ashes one day because he believes it will be mandatory for his resurrection.
“One day the earth will return to the dead,” he says, “and the Bible does speak of cremation.”
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