Filipinos Play Cards to Pay for Funerals

12/14/2016 - 11h53

In October, Emma Bernardino, a resident of Santa Cruz, in Greater Manila, received two bad news.

The body of her cousin Geronimo Samaniego Jr. had been found with his face and hands wrapped in duct tape.

Emma was being called to recognize the corpse - and to take care of the bill at Saint Rich, one of the funeral homes accredited by the police.

The price was 67,100 pesos (about US$ 1,345), if she chose a new coffin. If she accepted a disposable coffin, she would get a discount of 7,000 pesos. It's almost four times the 16,000 pesos needed to support a poor family for a month in the country.

Emma, unemployed with three children and without resources, thought about abandoning the body. The cousin was a distant relative who had been involved in drugs for 20 years and was targeted by a vigilante death squad in the drug war led by President Rodrigo Duterte.

In five months, there are already about 6,000 victims of police operations or death squads.

DOUBLE LOSS

In the Philippines, those who die are embalmed and the wakes last a few days.

Murders, however, cost more than twice as much as a normal death. The family is responsible for transporting the body to the autopsy site, the body's restoration, embalming, renting the funeral home and the death certificate, among others things.

Families lose a member who usually contributed to their livelihood and still have a high bill to pay. To raise money, Emma resorted to a method used to exhaustion: to promote card games and get commissions from the winners. Gambling is prohibited outside casinos, but an exception has been made to fund funerals.

Mass killings also have a moral cost. Relatives are accused of postponing burials to make money from the card games or even renting corpses to those who exploit the gambling.

MOTHERS WHO CRY

Accredited funeral services, on the other hand, are criticized for extorting families - many of them extremely poor, condition of most victims of the drug war.

"The problem is that 80% of these families have no money. Every month, more than 10 mothers sit here in this office and start crying, because they do not even have 10% of the amount needed to remove the body", says Pedro, owner of a funeral home in Pasay, Greater Manila.

Pedro says that he prefers to bury the corpses without receiving the entire due amount, because the waiting generates costs. Since July, when Duterte took office and the bodies of the poorest began to arrive at his funeral home, 33 corpses were removed for burial in collective graves.

Translated by MARINA DELLA VALLE

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