This Morning in the Cochabamba Public Cemetery

The public cemetery in Cochabamba is not a green hillside with white gravestones. It is a labyrinth of high while concrete walls, vaults really, where the dead are nailed into wooden coffins and stuffed into small rectangle slots – six high and maybe fifty wide.

I have been to these walls many more times than I would wish in my eight years here. A 12 year old boy from the orphanage where I volunteered. The mother of one of my first Bolivian friends. There have been others.

It’s the sounds that get to you. The raw wailing of a mother or daughter saying her last goodbye. The harsh scraping of wooden coffin against rough cement as it is shoved into the hole. The sound of plaster being slapped up against the small white nameplate that seals off the hole.

This morning was Palm Sunday and the Catholics of Cochabamba were awash with long woven palm fronds and church processions through the streets. And Palm Sunday seemed to being a record crowd as well to the public cemetery.

A blind woman yelling out, selling lottery tickets. A blind man playing accordion.

Young children, not a one that has seen ten years, bouncing up and down the long walkways between the labyrinths, working the crowd for coins. A boy that looks like a first grader offers to shine up any dusty headstone of my choice. A small girl offers to spill water from a plastic bucket onto wilting gravesite bouquets. Another young boy offers to say a prayer over the grave that brought me here to this place this morning.

I run into my neighbor, a generally cheerful man who age has bent and left with a large droopy mustache of white hair. “I come here every Sunday, “ he tells me, “to see my wife.”

A ten-foot high Jesus, dressed in mustard colored robes and a coffee-brown cape, looks solemnly downward, as if he is staring into the dirt. His right hand is raised in benediction.

Just off to Jesus’ left is the small gray rectangle of granite that marks the place where a 17-year-old Cochabamba boy, Victor Hugo Daza, once received his last goodbyes from his family, six years ago today. On the day before, April 8, 2000, Victor Hugo was gunned down and killed by a military sharpshooter during the Cochabamba Water Revolt. The next day, Sunday, a long procession of dark hair and dark clothing carried his coffin here.

A dozen of us went to accompany his family to this place, on this morning, to share this memory. The gray stone is hidden under bouquets of white and yellow daisies and an assortment of other flowers, including a purple one I can’t recognize. The only thing visible from underneath the flowers is his name and a raised metal cross. His mother is pouring fresh water from a discarded plastic container into the cutoff bottoms of sodas bottles that serve as makeshift vases.

A few of us say prayers. “It is said that there is no greater pain that that of a mother or a father losing a child.” I tried to find words. “I hope that Sra. Carmen and her family understand somewhere in their hearts that Victor Hugo is also a son of Cochabamba and that knowing he will not be forgotten will bring some relief to their hearts.”

The rest of his family arrives. His brother’s face is familiar. I have seen footage of it a score of times – writhing in pain and growling in anguish as his brother’s body is brought through massive crowds into the city’s central plaza and a sheet is removed, revealing the boy’s face, destroyed by a massive bullet hole through its center.

Victor Hugo Daza, 17 years old, killed exactly 6 years ago this weekend. A victim in the midst of a battle over something important and just. A mother’s son. Presente. Presente. Presente.