Juan Pablo Vaquero was declared dead in the Peruvian Amazonian city of Iquitos in the first wave of COVID-19 in April 2020. His sister was not allowed to see his body. After reportedly waking up in a pile of corpses in the woods, he appeared at her house three days later.
Uncle Covid, as Vaquero was known, became a local media sensation. His story was dismissed as an urban myth by the city’s political and professional elite. But it hit the poor majority in an unprecedented crisis.
As my new research on the pandemic in Iquitos shows, the first wave hit the city hard. By July 2020, about 70% of its residents had been infected. The region of Loreto – whose capital is Iquitos – had the highest death rate in Peru, with one of the highest death rates in the world.
I was in Iquitos just before the pandemic, researching the social and environmental challenges of this remote jungle city, the largest city in the world accessible by road.
When I returned there in 2022, Uncle Covid kept coming up in conversation. At first I was skeptical. But the more I learned, the more believable his story became.
cannibalistic capitalism
Poverty was largely responsible for the severity of the epidemic in Iquitos. Most people work informally in the city’s huge markets. Every day he has to raise money to support his family. They had no option but to break the strict lockdown imposed by the central government and bring the virus back into their crowded homes.
But the main cause of excess deaths was long-term shortage of medical oxygen. Decades of privatization and austerity had destroyed Peru’s health system before the pandemic. And it is widely believed that the depleted local health budget has been repeatedly plundered by Loreto’s regional government, which has been infiltrated by mafias involved in illegal gold mining, logging and the illegal drug trade.
When COVID-19 reached Iquitos in March 2020, there were only seven intensive care beds in the city’s main hospital and a broken oxygen plant unable to meet the overwhelming demand. A black market quickly emerged, with an oxygen tank costing 5,000 soles (£1,190) or more.
Rather than regulating this market, the regional government was one of its main players. The Union Health Ministry began sending oxygen tanks on daily flights from Lima. But civil servants and medical professionals told me that many of these tanks were stolen and resold by criminal gangs linked to powerful figures in the regional government, which was reportedly the most corrupt in Peru in 2020.
Oxygen’s black market was capitalism at its most cannibalistic. It was a market in life itself, in which savings were transferred to the mafia in exchange for a chance to survive.
The poor majority were kept out of this market. Thousands of people died from preventable cases of this disease. By the end of April 2020, the hospital morgue was full and the municipal incinerator was out of order. A mass grave was secretly opened outside the city, where the dead were taken away in trucks.
unrealistic stories
Iquitos was an extreme case of the social disruption experienced around the world during the pandemic. For billions of people, the normality of everyday life was suddenly replaced by empty cities, deserted highways, and mass death. The situation was often described as “unrealistic”. But academic research on the pandemic has largely ignored this surreal dimension.
I wanted to address this oversight in my research on Iquitos. To do this, I used a method called “ethnographic surrealism,” which gives voice to experiences, edited from standard scholarly accounts, to expose hidden truths about social collapse.
From this perspective emerged countless everyday stories in which reality took on the surreal qualities of a dream, such as the following experiences people shared with me about the journey of bodies to a mass grave.
The only people willing to collect the bodies to take to the grave were homeless crack addicts, who were paid a day rate and food. They were hired by a member of the regional government, who described them driving in pick-up trucks through the deserted city, eating hamburgers while sitting on piles of corpses wrapped in black garbage bags. “That was unreal!” He laughed. Then he started crying.
At first the bodies were kept in a refrigeration unit on the outskirts of Iquitos. But residents blocked the highway by burning tyres. He feared contagion and claimed the unit was broken and the smell of rotting flesh was in the air. A woman told me that she had seen dark clouds filled with the souls of the dead and heard their anguish: “How the dead mourned! Women who died while pregnant mourned, and the children who died in their wombs. Died, they cried.”
The grave was in the forest away from the main road. Witnesses described a brutal and chaotic process, in which diggers dug up the corpses with shovels and dropped them into a pit. According to one woman: “They dumped the dead like animals.” Another person agreed: “Like animals, they threw them on the side of the road.”
An urban myth?
In this context, the story of Uncle Covid seems less far-fetched.
I found his sister in a slum in the city. He told me he had left Iquitos and would no longer discuss his ordeal. But she agreed to share her experience with me.
After he was taken to the hospital, she was waiting in the corridor. “People were dying all around me like plague-stricken chickens,” she said. She saw that workers were wrapping their bodies in black plastic and “taking them away like garbage”.
After being informed of his death the next morning, she spent the entire day in the hospital trying to figure out what had happened to his body. Many other people were also making similar inquiries. Eventually she returned home that evening, without telling him where he was.
Two days later, his poverty forced him to return to work. She woke up at midnight to visit a secret night market operating under lockdown. Suddenly a neighbor shouted that his brother was at the door. He opened it and found it there. His clothes were dirty and the smell of death was coming from them. Everyone was afraid and told him not to let him come in. But she brought him inside and bathed him.
“Where were you brother?” He asked him. He replied, “I was in the garbage dump on the highway.” “I woke up lying in the garbage, on top of a pile of black bags.”
Juan Pablo Vaquero and his sister never received an official explanation for what happened. They believe he was taken to a mass grave outside the city and left for dead. His story is ridiculed by the city’s elite – those who could afford black market oxygen, and those whose family members were not secretly buried in open pits.
But Uncle Covid is still celebrated in the slums of Iquitos, where he has become a symbol of the rebellious existence of the poor, who refuse to be defeated by a cannibalistic capitalist system that commodifies the air they breathe. and turns them into waste.
Their resilience is the deeper truth that their surreal story tells. In the words of a slum dweller: “They said a man had died of Covid. They dug a pit to throw the dead bodies and left him there. But the man revived. He was infected by insects Came out covered and returned to his family.”
lessons for multiple crises
The story of the pandemic in Iquitos also reflects a broader truth about our time of so-called “polycrisis,” in which the world is beset by acute economic, social, political, and environmental problems that promise to only get worse.
As the first wave ended, there was a consensus in Iquitos that the reality that had emerged required radical change. According to two Catholic priests: “This pandemic has exposed all our flaws. The disintegration of society in Loreto is terrible. Malgovernance and corruption lead to death.”
A similar consensus emerged globally, as commentators warned that there could be no return to normality in the face of the impending planetary catastrophe, of which the pandemic was a harbinger, and of which it served as an urgent warning. .
But the same cannibalistic capitalist system dominates in Iquitos. No one has been prosecuted for many of the alleged corruption cases. And when the second wave hit in January 2021, the whole cycle started again, with collapsing hospitals and the re-emergence of a black market for oxygen.
Around the world, as we approach the fifth anniversary of the start of the pandemic, it seems we have learned little from its lessons.
In the context of our deepening multiple crisis, the figure of Uncle Covid remains a symbol of the suffering caused by the corruption of cannibalistic capitalism. But the surreal image of a dead man staggering down an empty street also resembles this distorted system: a system that not only kills but refuses to die. Like Uncle Covid, cannibalistic capitalism tears apart corpses and staggers on the highway.
,Author: Jeffy Wilson, Lecturer in Human-Environment Interactions, Bangor University)
,disclosure statement: Jeffy Wilson does not work for, consult, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and he has no relevant affiliations beyond his academic appointment. Not disclosed.)
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
