Venezuela's Cemeteries Are Full — The Unidentified Dead Nobody Can Name

Two weeks after the earthquakes, heavy machinery is still working at La Esperanza cemetery in La Guaira. Not digging for survivors. Digging graves. More than 20 rows of freshly excavated trenches. 500 new burial plots in two weeks. 150 of them reserved for people with no name. No family. No one waiting to claim them. At least 80 bodies were moved into the ground in a single day. Several trucks arrived throughout Monday carrying coffins. Police guarded the entrance. And somewhere in those lettered terraces, marked A, B, C, D, F and G, someone's father, someone's daughter, someone's grandmother is buried under a code that no family has yet been able to match. Tens of thousands of people remain unaccounted for. The families are still searching. The cemetery keeps expanding. And the identified and the unidentified lie forty meters apart on the same hillside.