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Four days after the devastating earthquakes that shook Venezuela, the chances of finding more survivors among the rubble are dramatically decreasing in the La Guaira state, where victims' families are denouncing government neglect and the lack of heavy machinery to remove the debris from the collapsed buildings, according to El Nuevo Herald.
The two earthquakes, measuring 7.2 and 7.5, occurred on June 24 with just 39 seconds apart and caused the collapse of at least 250 buildings in La Guaira. The official toll has risen to 1,450 dead and 3,238 injured, while the UN estimates more than 50,000 missing.
In Playa Grande, one of the hardest-hit areas, Leonela Delgado, 38 years old, has been searching for her stepson for four days among the debris of the Belo Horizonte building, a 17-story structure that has been reduced to just four floors standing.
“Hope is the last thing to be lost, but we don’t have much hope left,” Delgado told the EFE agency.
From the very beginning, he recounted, there were people alive trapped under the rubble, but without the proper tools or equipment, it was impossible to reach them in time. "From the day we arrived, there were many people who were alive (...) and we tried to move a few things, to shift rubble, but well, we were not successful," he stated.
On Friday, Delgado arrived to extract bodies of people who had called for help days earlier. "They were trapped under very heavy slabs, and we didn't have the tools, machinery, or appropriate equipment to be able to remove and move those people," he recounted.
The most serious accusation points directly to the official response. "The police come, take a video, take a photo, and leave. They just did it now, and that has been the recurring factor since the incident occurred (...) everything has been done voluntarily; there has been no contingency plan implemented by any government entity," he stated.
The nurse Diana Guzmán, who traveled from Spain upon learning the magnitude of the disaster, found a critical situation upon arrival. "Unfortunately, there are people who have lost their lives due to a lack of rescuers, due to a shortage of trained personnel. We have individuals who are already in a state of decomposition, bodies like that of my relative, where, unfortunately, we have not had (...) a response from the Government," she reported.
Guzmán described how the family members themselves carry out the rescue efforts without any training. "Everything they do is done empirically, driven by the desire to recover their loved one, whether alive or deceased," Delgado noted.
The only assistance that has arrived in Playa Grande comes from civilians, small firefighting teams, Civil Protection, and international brigades from Italy and Ecuador, part of the more than 2,200 rescuers from at least 17 countries deployed in the area.
Amid the drama, extraordinary rescues have been recorded in the days leading up to this: on Saturday, a 18-day-old baby, their mother, and an 11-year-old boy were rescued alive after spending more than 74 hours under the rubble, and this Sunday, rescue teams pulled another person alive from a collapsed building in Caraballeda.
The United States Geological Survey estimated with a 42% probability that the final number of victims could be between 10,000 and 100,000 people, a figure that would make these earthquakes the largest natural disaster in Venezuelan history, surpassing even the Vargas landslide of 1999, which left between 10,000 and 30,000 dead in the same state of La Guaira.
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