Wherever I look I see motionless bodies lying on the crumbling concrete floor of a barren courtyard in the burning sun. The patients appear to have been heavily sedated. Their heads have been shaved and most are dressed in rags with nothing on their feet.
Others are totally naked, exposing their dirty skin covered in their own faeces and urine. They look more like concentration camp prisoners than patients.
The Federico Mora Hospital is home to around 340 patients, including 50 violent and mentally-disturbed criminals. But according to the hospital's director, Romeo Minera, only a minority have serious mental health problems - a staggering 74% have arrived in need of little more than attention and care and should have stayed in the community.
Minera believes we are charity workers, offering help to his failed institution. Journalists are not welcome here - our cover story was the only way to get access to a hospital that has been condemned by human rights groups.
Walking into one of the wards is like entering a hell on Earth. We find more patients in rags sitting on the floor and in plastic chairs, rocking themselves for comfort. There appears to be no form of stimulation in the dark, sparse ward.
The patients reach out to us, desperate for human contact. A man wraps his arms around my chest and begs me to take him away from the hospital.
A male nurse tells me that two or three nurses have to look after 60 to 70 patients, others explain the only way they can cope is by sedating them. As my translator distracts the director, I slip away to the sleeping quarters that line a long, dark corridor. Here I find more patients lying in broken, rusting metal beds.
The patients appear too sedated to take themselves to the toilet. There are puddles of urine on the mattresses, and the clothing on some of the patients is covered in their own faeces. The stench of human filth overwhelms me and I try desperately to stop myself from vomiting.
In response to our investigation, the Guatemalan government said that the hospital "uses the minimum dose of sedatives as recommended by the World Health Organization" and defended conditions in the hospital. "There are trained nurses to attend to the needs of patients including keeping them clean and dressed; and a maintenance team to keep the wards clean," it stated.
But this is not the end of the horror that surrounds us. We are secretly filming the director as he makes an astonishing admission - the guards sexually abuse the patients. The hospital, he says, is a big place "where anything can happen".
"Since I was sedated I wasn't aware of it - I didn't realise until the next day that I had lost my innocence. I was bleeding down my legs, so I realised that what had happened that night is that a male nurse had come in and raped me," she explains.
This was on her third day in the hospital. After two weeks her cries for help led her family to remove her. "You can never forget that experience," she says, tearfully. "You store it in your mind. I still think of the patients in there."
Ricardo, another former patient, says he was raped throughout the three years he spent at Federico Mora. He was only released after a legal battle, claiming he was wrongly diagnosed with schizophrenia.
"They took advantage of the female patients when they were sedated and not in their right mind," Ricardo says. "The police officers, the patients and the male nurses - and some doctors too. They put the prettiest girls aside for themselves at night."
Hospital patient lying on bed
(BBC)
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