With Rescue Operations Winding Down, Venezuelans Left to Recover Lost Loved Ones on Their Own

LA GAIRA, Venezuela — When the high-rise apartment where Noel Márquez lived with his family collapsed and caught fire during Venezuela’s back-to-back earthquakes, Márquez—who happened to be at his girlfriend’s residence—rushed to the scene and called out for his mother, grandparents, and siblings. Only his 17-year-old brother, trapped beneath concrete columns that required heavy machinery to remove, answered.

Márquez and his father, also among the survivors, spoke to Leonel through the layers of concrete, hearing him cry for help and struggle to breathe through thick smoke as they waited for a crane that never arrived. After several hours, Leonel’s pleas faded into silence, Márquez recalled.

Yet even that horror was not the worst of it. Márquez said the deepest anguish came from attempting to recover his relatives’ mutilated remains with little more than his bare hands and a saw. He severed limbs to free Leonel and his mother but was compelled to leave his eight-months-pregnant sister, grandmother, and other family members beneath the debris—abandoning not only their bodies but also the hope of granting them a proper burial.

“It’s unfair. It’s inhumane, everything that is happening,” said the 26-year-old from an overwhelmed 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 among countless Venezuelans who, following days of suffering, have been left to search not for survivors but for the remains of loved ones—and for some measure of closure.

International rescue teams, quietly conceding that no further survivors were likely after 12 days beneath the rubble, are preparing to leave. Local authorities are shifting their attention to housing thousands of displaced residents. Yet recovering the dead has become an urgent and grim responsibility for grieving families.

“I found her hand, but her torso is crushed,” said Norely Rodríguez, struggling to retrieve her 5-year-old daughter from the ruins in hardest-hit La Guaira state. “I want to see if I can get her out whole.”

Many say that just as they lacked government aid in the rescue effort after the quakes, they remain unprepared to recover their dead nearly two weeks later.

As time passes, the recovery grows more macabre, noted firefighter William Gomez. “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.”

Officials reported Sunday that the death toll had climbed to 3,342, with 16,740 injured. Beyond that lies an uncounted loss: those still buried. No official figures exist for the number trapped in debris, but over 30,000 missing-person reports have been filed via a website launched by the Venezuelan opposition.

Over the weekend in La Guaira, no civil defense or security personnel were seen assisting families. Most working the wreckage were civilians using bare hands or basic tools such as pickaxes and shovels, sometimes joined by firefighters and the remaining Mexican rescuers.

“We are the ones helping ourselves: our family. Nobody else helps us except for a few volunteers,” said Yeikhary Urbina, who on Saturday found her mother and brother suspended in concrete, apparently embracing.

Teams from Italy, Argentina, Spain, and others have departed. The government has not formally ended the survivor search, but officials have moved from broadcasting rescue narratives to announcing rebuilding under a program called Venezuela Reborn.

“Venezuela is entering a process of infrastructure recovery, of housing recovery,” acting President Delcy Rodríguez said on state television Saturday.

Families face new terrors while sifting rubble. Some find remains so decayed they cannot be identified. Others dig and find nothing. “She kept asking, ‘Why did God play this trick on me?’” said Geraldine Perdomo of her sister, frantically clawing through her home for evidence of her two daughters’ deaths.

And some, like Márquez, fought for days to extract bodies only to lose them again in the chaos of the temporary morgue beneath grain silos at La Guaira port, where corpses have flowed steadily since the June 24 quakes.

Márquez said that a week after delivering the bodies, he learned Sunday that authorities had located his mother and grandfather. But Leonel, he said, “is still missing because of the negligence here.”

He and other residents of public housing blocks—built for low-income families under former leader Hugo Chávez—say negligence complaints predate the disaster. High-rises pancaked in the quakes, raising questions about substandard construction.

Alexander, a 42-year-old police officer in one tower, trembled with anger Sunday at the government—for ignoring residents’ warnings of poor construction, for late rescue response that cost his wife and three daughters, and for failing to provide machinery to recover them.

“Not a single person from the government was here,” he said, asking to be cited by first name for fear of retaliation as a public employee.

After 11 days, he reached his last missing relative—his 12-year-old daughter, decomposed but intact.

“She was waiting for me to pull her out,” he said, cradling the black plastic body bag.

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DeBre reported from Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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