VALENCIA, Venezuela — The cemetery did not look or smell like a peaceful resting ground for the dead. It felt more like a mass grave, populated with white crosses, buzzing flies, dirt piles and mourners, some wailing, “Why, why?”

At least 40 wooden coffins, according to workers, were interred at the cemetery on the outskirts of the industrial city of Valencia in Carabobo State on Friday in hastily organized funerals for victims of one of Venezuela’s most horrific jail fires.

There were no priests, no religious rituals, few comforting words from Venezuelan officials, who have yet to explain how such carnage could have happened. President Nicolás Maduro has not even mentioned it.