By the time Ramón Soto reached the crime scene, the wounded man was twitching, bloody and barely alive. A woman nearby collapsed to her knees, wailing, and a poster lay on the ground with a drug cartel’s warning: “You know who is next.”
Mr. Soto, though, showed no trace of emotion as the man went still. “He is dead,” he said. “He is dead.” Then he asked the sobbing woman if she was family and needed funeral services.
For a quiet fraternity of funeral workers in Mexico’s Sinaloa State, each day begins and ends with death. But what was once a dignified profession, they say, guiding the bereaved through the disorienting maze that follows a death, now puts them at the center of the carnage engulfing their state.
Warring factions of the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the world’s most powerful criminal groups, are vying for control of its multibillion-dollar empire. The Mexican government, under intense pressure from the Trump administration, has begun an aggressive crackdown on the cartel, too.
The battle has sown chaos in the state, leaving more than 1,900 dead and 2,000 missing over the last year, according to official data.
For the barely 30 funeral home workers of the state capital, Culiacán, the business of ferrying the dead, whether cartel gunmen or innocent people caught in between, has never been busier or harder to bear.
“I live alongside death, day in and day out,” said Josué Nahum García, an employee at the San Martin Funeral Home. “Not only do I see it every day, but I feel it too — in the pain and tears of the families who have lost their loved ones.”
Living on Constant Call
In Sinaloa, the workers rush from crime scenes and accident sites to hospitals and morgues, wherever death has struck. Although the authorities typically recover bodies, they sometimes ask the workers to help because there are too many scenes for them to manage alone.
The workers then offer services at every step: delivering bodies from morgues to funeral homes, helping families with bureaucracy and paperwork, preparing corpses, arranging coffins and performing burials and memorials.
In 14 years on the job, Mr. García said, he has never seen anything like the past year for the sheer scale of violence. Just last month, he said, he and his colleagues recovered 262 bodies — half of them victims of violent killings.
At times, Mr. García, a slender 40-year-old who wears a blue button-down shirt and suit pants on the job, can seem impervious to the region’s scorching heat and to the stench of death.
But some days are harder than others, he said. A few months ago, he was called to a scene where, inside a bullet-riddled car, he found the slumped bodies of a father and two sons: one 14 and the other barely 8 years old. The police later told him that cartel gunmen had motioned for the father to stop and, in a panic, he sped up instead.
When he returned home that night, Mr. García said, he locked himself in the bathroom and cried, muffling the sound so his wife and daughter would not hear.
Like many colleagues, he has tried leaving the job for short stretches. But he feels drawn, he said, to the adrenaline of a chase and the urgency of each death.
As heavy as the psychological toll can be, the workers say they also find purpose, even solace, in their duties, offering dignity to families scarred by violence as well as to those mourning deaths from accidents and natural causes.
“The greatest satisfaction comes when a relative comes to me and says, ‘Thank you, he looks so peaceful, as if he were only sleeping,’” said Gérman Sarabia, a 55-year-old whose work includes embalming bodies.
No matter the circumstance of death, he said, he tries to restore humanity to each body, smoothing features, massaging faces, pushing mouths to hint at gentle smiles. “At least I can give them that small measure of relief,” he said.
The workers also guide families, often stunned and paralyzed by grief, through the confusing legal paperwork and bureaucracy that follows death.
“I want to believe that I help them in that way, at least a little bit, in the middle of all their pain,” Mr. García said on a recent night, waiting outside a hospital and scanning for families of the newly deceased — potential clients.
But he also wonders when the bloodshed will end. “It’s enough pain already,” he said.
‘A Service Someone Has to Provide’
The funeral workers say that although the war has increased their monthly earnings by as much as a third, to about $1,000 from $730, the extra money comes with a steep emotional cost.
“I would trade that money for feeling free and unafraid,” said Javier Aragón, a 36-year-old who has worked at Emaús Funerary Home for 16 years.
Victims of the cartel violence have included fathers, mothers, children on their way to school and teachers, among others. They have been found in canals, open fields, sprawled on the asphalt and inside running cars. Bodies often bear signs of torture, but many who are killed were simply bystanders at the wrong intersection of place and time.
Each funeral worker carries the burden of his job in his own way. Some say numbness has crept in. Some speak of a mental and physical exhaustion that clings to the body. Some say they have learned to switch off emotion entirely. Others confess that certain scenes still cut through, like one in which a mother was struck by a stray bullet while holding her baby.
Many say the job simply must be done.
“It is a service someone has to provide,” Mr. Aragón said. “We don’t judge if they were good or bad, they are all people and their families need our services.”
A mix of learning to detach emotionally and counseling courses have helped him process the job’s toll, he said.
“We are intermediaries between our companies and the families,” he said. “That is why we can have empathy without absorbing their pain because it is their process to go through, not ours.”
In the hardship of the job, the men have found fellowship. During any given week, they often spend more time together — on the road, waiting outside morgues and hospitals, sometimes through 24-hour shifts — than with their families.
Few carry the weight as personally as Guillermo Torres Rangel, 45, who started as a funeral worker when he was 18.
A decade ago, he was called to a car found submerged in a canal on Culiacán’s outskirts, a woman’s body floating nearby.
When he arrived, he did what he had done countless times before — scanned the body for the likely cause of death, the first step before a search for any relatives. But this time, the body was not a stranger’s. He was the relative.
It was his youngest sister, who had gone missing three months earlier after leaving for a party with a friend.
Her body had begun to disintegrate from weeks under water, he recalled. But he recognized the small piece of black lace stitched by their mother into the undergarments her daughters wore.
He stood frozen, unable to move or speak, he recalled. Then he fainted.
Mr. Torres spent months in depression, and left the funeral home.
“I wanted my own death,” he recalled. “I didn’t want to deal with anyone else’s.”
But after nine years, necessity pulled him back. He needed a job, and the funeral home was hiring.
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