A Pandemic Tragedy in Guayaquil

March 7, 2022

(The New Yorker) – The problem with any story, big or small, is that you’re always starting in the middle. All beginnings are constructions we use to make sense of what is mostly incomprehensible. Of course, there are facts. For example: during one particularly violent twenty-four-hour period in January, eighteen people were murdered in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city and its commercial and industrial capital. That week, there were thirty murders altogether. For the dead, those murders marked the end of their stories. For the city, which just two years ago was battered by one of the world’s most virulent outbreaks of covid-19, the murders were something else: a plot twist in an ongoing narrative of disaster. Guayaquil has a history of violence that stretches back to the days of its founding, in the sixteenth century, but what is happening now is new: January, 2022, ended with seventy-nine murders, nearly three times the number in the same month in 2020, just before the pandemic began. (Read More)