A so called chicken bus – the colourful former US school buses that transit the Guatemalan roads – had a horrible accident Friday night. I saw it on the news later on.
The bus had fallen off a mountain side on the Carretera El Salvador and had been completely destroyed. I have never seen a vehicle look like that before. Long lines of corpses covered in blankets were placed along the roadside, while the police struggled to get survivors out of the wreck.
It turns out that the bus driver was a 21–year old guy who did not have a professional bus driver’s license. And like all other drivers of chicken buses he was going way too fast. A survivor told that the driver had said the brakes were not working just before the accident.
It also turns out that the bus company did not have any insurance, so the relatives of the departed – among them apparently several orphans – will not receive any compensation.
But this is not an exceptional case in Guatemala – apart from the number of victims. In many ways this was the story of a death foretold.
It does not take a rocket scientist to see that most of the buses in Guatemala are only fit for the junkyard. And you do not have to be psychic to foresee that the insane driving of the bus drivers will lead to this sort of accidents. And it does. Every week.
Politicians and police and everybody else are apparently very upset and will take measures to prevent this from happening again. But this is not something new. They have known about the state of things forever and have done nothing.
They will put on a serious face and talk about it for the next week. Then there will be silence, and then people will gradually forget about the whole thing. And then nothing what so ever will happen. In a month or two another incompetent driver will drive like a madman and crash another defect bus - and a few more families will be destroyed.
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