As quake rescue effort winds down, Venezuelans are left alone to recover their dead
Venezuelans are digging through earthquake rubble with their bare hands to recover loved ones as international rescue teams depart and anger rises over the government’s response
LA GUAIRA, Venezuela -- When the high-rise where Noel Márquez lived with his family crashed to the ground and burst into flames in Venezuela's twin earthquakes, Márquez, who happened to be at his girlfriend’s apartment, raced home and called out for his mother, grandparents and siblings. Only his 17-year-old brother, his legs pinned under columns that required heavy machinery to lift, responded.
Márquez and his father, who also survived, spoke through layers of concrete, hearing Leonel suffer, shout for help and inhale suffocating smoke as he waited for a crane to remove the columns crushing him. But it never came. After several hours, Leonel's cries gave way to silence, Márquez said.
But even that, terrible as it was, was not what disturbed him the most. The worst, Márquez said, was trying to recover his families' tangled remains with little more than his bare hands and a saw. He sliced off limbs to free the corpses of Leonel and his mother but was forced to abandon his sister, who was eight-months' pregnant, grandmother and other relatives beneath the ruins — and with their bodies, the hope that if he couldn't save them, he could at least give them proper burials.
“It’s unfair. It’s inhumane, everything that is happening,” 26-year-old Márquez said from the overflowing makeshift morgue at La Guaira port. "We couldn’t get my brother out because we didn’t get a response from the state ... and after 11 days, we are still requesting a crane.”
Márquez is one of countless Venezuelans who, after days of torment, has been left alone to search, if not for signs of life, then for loved ones’ remains — and for some semblance of closure.
International rescue teams, quietly acknowledging the possibility that no more victims would be found alive after 12 days under the rubble, are preparing to depart. Local authorities are turning their focus to finding shelter for thousands of displaced people. But the recovery of the dead has become a pressing, and horrifying, task for Venezuelans still missing their loved ones.
“I found her hand, but her torso is crushed," said Norely Rodríguez, trying to get her 5-year-old daughter out of the ruins in the hardest-hit state of La Guaira. “I want to see if I can get her out whole."
Many say that just as they were left without government help to rescue survivors in the immediate aftermath of the quakes, so too are they now under-equipped to unearth their dead nearly two weeks later.
The more time passes, the more gruesome the recovery process becomes, said William Gomez, a firefighter in La Guaira. “It has been difficult because the bodies are already in an advanced state of decomposition, decomposed to such an extent that many times when we try to remove them, they fall apart.”
Authorities announced that the death toll rose on Sunday to 3,342, with another 16,740 people injured. Beyond that is an untold toll: those whose bodies have yet to be found. There are no official statistics on how many people are buried under the rubble, but more than 30,000 reports of missing people have been sent to a website set up by the Venezuelan opposition.
Over the weekend in La Guaira, no government civil defense crews or security forces could be seen helping families dig. The vast majority of those working their way through the wreckage were civilians using their bare hands or rudimentary tools like pickaxes and shovels, occasionally accompanied by firefighters and Mexican rescuers who remain in the country.
“We are the ones helping ourselves: our family. Nobody else helps us except for a few volunteers,” said Yeikhary Urbina, who found the bodies of her mother and brother on Saturday suspended under piles of concrete, seemingly locked in an embrace.
Search teams from Italy, Argentina, Spain and other countries have already returned home. The Venezuelan government has not yet called off the search for survivors. But officials have pivoted from promoting heroic rescue stories on social media to announcing reconstruction plans under a program called Venezuela Reborn.
“Venezuela is entering a process of infrastructure recovery, of housing recovery,” acting President Delcy Rodríguez told state TV on Saturday.
Families with missing loved ones face fresh horrors as they scour the rubble. Some have searched for days to find corpses of loved ones so decomposed, they cannot tell them apart.
Others have dug and dug only to find nothing at all. “She kept asking, ‘Why did God play this trick on me?’" Geraldine Perdomo said of her sister, who was feverishly clawing at the ruins of her home for anything that would confirm the death of her two daughters.
And some, like Márquez, have agonized for days to extract their loved ones' bodies only to lose them again in the chaos of the impromptu morgue beneath grain silos at the La Guaira port, where a near-constant stream of bodies has been arriving since the June 24 quakes.
Márquez said that on Sunday, a week after delivering their corpses, he heard authorities had located his mother and grandfather. But Leonel, he said, "is still missing because of the negligence here.”
He and many other residents of the country’s public housing blocks — built years ago for low-income families by former socialist leader Hugo Chávez — say their complaints of negligence long predate this disaster. High-rise buildings housing hundreds of apartments pancaked in the earthquakes, reviving questions about substandard construction.
Alexander, a 42-year-old police officer who lived in one of the towers, was trembling with fury at the government on Sunday — for not addressing what he said were long-running resident concerns that his concrete housing complex was shoddily constructed, for not sending rescue teams in time to save his wife and three daughters, and now, for not delivering heavy machinery to help him recover their bodies.
"Not a single person from the government was here," he said, requesting to be identified only by his first name because, as a government employee, he feared retaliation for criticizing authorities.
After 11 days of searching, he reached the last missing member of his family — his 12-year-old daughter, her corpse decomposed but intact.
“She was waiting for me to pull her out,” he said, cradling the black plastic body bag in his arms.
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DeBre reported from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
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