By SIMON ROMERO
CARACAS, Venezuela — Bougainvillea shade the pathways at the Cementerio General del Sur, where the mausoleums of statesmen and movie stars stand next to the graves of aristocrats and thousands of commoners. Sculpted lions gaze down from sepulchers. Elegance, not anarchy, once defined this resting place.
No longer.
Now, crypts for once-feared military rulers have been ransacked. Coffins, twisted open with crowbars, lie strewn under samán trees. Cages with padlocked gates surround the burial sites of some families, as if that might protect them from a disturbing reality: not even Caracas’s city of the dead is safe.
Accompanying Venezuela’s soaring levels of murders and kidnappings, its cemeteries are the setting for a new kind of crime wave. Grave robbers are looting them for human bones, answering demand from some practitioners of a fast-growing transplanted Cuban religion called Palo that uses the bones in its ceremonies.
Critics contend the cemetery bedlam reflects a societal breakdown in which impunity is widespread. Violent crime and police corruption in the country are pervasive even as President Hugo Chávez is calling for the creation of a “new man” as part of his socialist-inspired revolution.
more info:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/world/americas/11venez.html
