Buried alive? The surreal story of how COVID took over a remote city in the Amazon

Juan Pablo Vaquero was pronounced dead in the Peruvian Amazonian city of Iquitos in the first wave of COVID-19 in April 2020. His sister wasn’t allowed to see his body. Three days later he appeared at her home, after having allegedly awoken in a pile of corpses in the jungle.

Uncle Covid, as Vaquero came to be known, became a local media sensation. His story was dismissed as an urban myth by the political and professional elites of the city. But it struck a chord with an impoverished majority trapped in an unprecedented crisis.

As my new research on the pandemic in Iquitos shows, the first wave hit the city hard. Around 70% of its inhabitants had been infected by July 2020. The region of Loreto – of which Iquitos is the capital – had the highest death rate in Peru, which had the highest death rate in the world.

I had been in Iquitos just before the pandemic, researching the social and environmental challenges of this remote jungle city, the largest in the world unreachable by road.

When I returned there in 2022, Uncle Covid kept coming up in conversation. I was sceptical at first. But the more I learned, the more plausible his story became.

Cannibal capitalism

Poverty was largely responsible for the severity of the pandemic in Iquitos. Most people work informally in the vast markets of the city. Each day they must find the money to feed their families. They had no choice but to break the strict lockdown imposed by the central government, and to bring the virus back into their overcrowded homes.

But the principal cause of excess deaths was a chronic scarcity of medical oxygen. Decades of privatisation and austerity had decimated the Peruvian health system before the pandemic. And the diminished local health budget is widely regarded to have been repeatedly looted by the regional government of Loreto, which is infiltrated by mafias involved in the illegal gold mining, logging and illegal drug trades.

When COVID-19 arrived in Iquitos in March 2020, the city’s main hospital had only seven intensive care beds and a malfunctioning oxygen plant unable to meet the vast demand. A black market quickly emerged, with a single oxygen tank costing 5,000 soles (£1,190) or more.

Instead of regulating this market, the regional government was one of its main players. The central health ministry began sending oxygen tanks on daily flights from Lima. But civil servants and medical professionals told me many of these tanks were stolen and resold by criminal gangs connected to powerful figures in the regional government, which in 2020 was allegedly the most corrupt in Peru.

The black market in oxygen was capitalism in its most cannibalistic form. It was a market in life itself, in which savings were transferred to mafias in exchange for the chance of survival.

The impoverished majority were excluded from this market. Thousands died from preventable cases of the disease. By late April 2020, the hospital morgue was overflowing and the municipal incinerator had broken down. A mass grave was secretly opened outside the city, to which the dead were taken by the truckload.

Surreal stories

Iquitos was an extreme case of the social breakdown experienced across 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 “surreal”. But academic research on the pandemic has largely overlooked this surreal dimension.

I wanted to address this oversight in my research on Iquitos. To do so, I used a method called “ethnographic surrealism”, which gives voice to experiences edited out of standard scholarly accounts, to expose hidden truths about societal collapse.

This approach revealed 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 the bodies to the mass grave.

The only people willing to collect the bodies for transport to the grave were homeless crack addicts paid a day rate plus 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 stacks of corpses wrapped in black garbage bags. “That was surreal!” he laughed. Then he started crying.

At first the bodies were held in a refrigeration unit on the outskirts of Iquitos. But residents barricaded the highway with burning tyres. They feared contagion and claimed that the unit had broken down and the air reeked of decomposing flesh. A woman told me she had seen black clouds containing the spirits of the dead and had heard their suffering: “How the dead mourned! Women who died while pregnant mourned, and the babies who died in their stomachs cried.”

The grave was in the jungle out of sight of the main road. Witnesses described a brutal and chaotic process, in which excavators shovelled up the corpses and dropped them into a pit. According to one woman: “They threw the dead away like animals.” Another man agreed: “Like animals, they threw them away beside the road.”

An urban myth?

In this context, the story of Uncle Covid seemed less far-fetched.

I found his sister in one of the city’s slums. She told me he had left Iquitos and would no longer discuss his ordeal. But she agreed to share her experience with me.

After taking him to hospital, she had waited in the corridor. “The people were dying all around me like chickens with the plague,” she said. She watched as staff wrapped their bodies in black plastic and “carried them away like garbage”.

After being informed of his death the following morning, she spent the whole day at the hospital trying to find out what had happened to his body. Many others were making similar enquiries. She finally returned home that evening, without having been told where he was.

Two days later, her poverty forced her to return to work. She got up at midnight to travel to a clandestine nocturnal market operating under lockdown. Suddenly a neighbour shouted that her brother was at the door. She opened it and found him there. His clothes were filthy and he stank of death. Everyone was terrified and told her not to let him in. But she brought him in and bathed him.

“Where were you brother?” she asked him. “I was out on the highway in a garbage dump,” he replied. “I woke up in the trash, 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 the mass grave outside the city and left for dead. Their story is mocked by the elites of the city – those who could afford black market oxygen, and whose family members were not secretly buried in an open pit.

But Uncle Covid is still celebrated in the slums of Iquitos, where he has come to symbolise the rebellious survival of the poor, who refuse to be defeated by a cannibal capitalist system that trades in the air they breathe and reduces them to trash.

Their resilience is the deeper truth that his surreal story tells. In one slum-dweller’s words: “There was a man they said had died of COVID. They dug a hole to dump the bodies and left him there. But the man revived. He emerged covered in maggots and returned to his family.”

Lessons for the polycrisis

The story of the pandemic in Iquitos also captures a broader truth about our time of so-called “polycrisis”, in which the world is gripped by acute economic, social, political and environmental problems that only promise to get worse.

As the first wave drew to a close, there was a consensus in Iquitos that the reality it had revealed demanded radical change. According to two Catholic priests: “This pandemic has brought all our flaws to light. The decomposition of society in Loreto in terrible. Misrule and corruption work for death”.

A similar consensus emerged globally, as commentators warned there could be no return to normality in the face of the impending planetary catastrophe of which the pandemic was a harbinger, and for which it had served as an urgent warning.

But in Iquitos, the same cannibal capitalist system continues to dominate. No-one has been prosecuted for the multiple alleged cases of corruption. And when the second wave hit in January 2021, the entire cycle began again, complete with collapsing hospitals and the reemergence of the oxygen black market.

Worldwide, 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 polycrisis, the figure of Uncle Covid continues to embody the suffering caused by the corruption of cannibal capitalism. But the surreal image of an undead man staggering along an empty road also resembles this perverse system itself: a system that not only kills but also refuses to die. Like Uncle Covid, cannibal capitalism tears through the corpses and stumbles on down the highway.

Japhy Wilson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.