GUATEMALA CITY–Ronny Cruz trawls through rotting trash every day looking for valuables at Central America's largest dump, despite recent landslides that killed some 20 people under mountains of refuse.
"I've worked here all my life; my mother would carry me here as an infant on her back. If I don't come, my family doesn't eat," said the 34-year-old father of four, overlooking Guatemala City's sprawling 28-hectare landfill.
The poor scavenge through garbage dumps in cities throughout the developing world, but Guatemala City's site is particularly dangerous. Every rainy season, from May to October, people die when saturated trash crushes unlucky scavengers.
Nineteen people have died under rubbish in the past three months alone.
Just hours after a landslide killed 11 last month, many scavengers had returned to work.
Many work with permits granted by local authorities, but only a limited number are available. Hundreds of others, including Cruz, are forced to wade through garbage in the most dangerous parts of the dump.
"There is some regulation. There are areas where people have to identify themselves, but the people who died sneaked in without authorization," says Ricardo Lemus, a spokesperson for the emergency workers who helped dig out the bodies last month.
Some 4,000 men, women and children wake at dawn to try to meet the daily trucks hauling tonnes of garbage to the site. They spend long hours foraging for food, clothing, plastics, metals – even jewellery stripped from corpses dumped over the fence from a neighbouring cemetery after families were unable to pay grave maintenance fees.
Almost 2 million people in Guatemala live on less than $1 a day and an unequal distribution of wealth means the small country suffers from the highest infant malnutrition rate in the Western Hemisphere.
"You look for anything you can recycle, like pieces of tin roof ... electrical cables, pothole covers, water meters, anything you get that's metal is very good," says Nancy McGirr, who runs an organization to help children at the dump.
With metals prices rising, the finds can mean a little more money for the diggers.
But the most popular truck is the one that comes from McDonald's filled with fast-food leftovers. "Not only do you need things that you can sell but you also need to eat as well," McGirr said.
