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At least 920 dead and more than 50.
At least 920 dead and more than 50,000 missing: the toll from the double earthquake in Venezuela is rising by the hour on Friday, as despair grows in the face of limited help from the authorities.
The 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude tremors that hit the north of the country on Wednesday left a scene of devastation, with countless collapsed buildings, especially in La Guaira, a coastal town near Caracas, where residents are criticizing the government’s weak response in the rescue operations.
The number of deaths from the earthquakes that struck Venezuela rose to 920 on Friday, announced the president of the National Assembly, Jorge Rodriguez.In Geneva, the UN’s humanitarian aid chief, Tom Fletcher, told AFP that more than 50,000 people were missing. “This is an extremely complex relief operation,” he warned, estimating that the toll could “increase significantly.”
The first teams of foreign rescuers have started working in this crisis-hit country, whose health system is in a sorry state. But the rescue operations are moving slowly, and bodies are still visible under the rubble.
In La Guaira, many buildings are now just piles of debris.
Families, neighbors, and volunteers are moving around as best they can among the rubble. They are asking for specialized machines to be able to cut the steel bars or move the heavy blocks of stone.
Marlon Ochoa survived a building collapse. “I’m looking for my mother, my wife, and my son,” he says, “we need help, there are people alive” and “they’re not giving us tools” to get them out of the debris.International Aid
Nearly 48 hours after the most devastating earthquakes recorded in Venezuela since 1900, international search and rescue teams from at least 17 countries have started providing aid.
The United States announced on Friday that they would deploy a 250-person team on site, after offering $150 million and sending two warships, transport planes, and helicopters to support the country.
Rescuers from El Salvador, Mexico, Colombia, and Switzerland have already arrived.
In front of a group of five collapsed buildings in La Guaira, the head of a Chilean rescue contingent, Nadiomar Polanco, said that there was “unfortunately (…) little chance of finding people alive.”His team, the first to arrive on the scene according to him, is focusing on searching for the bodies of ‘people who had already died.’
At least 28 Portuguese victims or people of Portuguese descent, two Brazilians, an Italian-Venezuelan, and two Chinese are among the dead. Spain reported that five of its citizens had died.
‘Useless’ authorities
In La Guaira, where the country’s main airport has been rendered unusable by the earthquake, some residents are trying to dig out their buried relatives themselves.
‘He’s there,’ says Alessandro del Giudice, a 23-year-old man, sobbing as he tries to find his father under a mountain of rubble.His grandmother Amparo, desperate, is trying to clear the rubble with her bare hands to find her son. “There are a lot of stone blocks, we can’t remove them with our hands,” she says helplessly.
“The authorities are useless, totally useless. The military should be here with all the machinery they have,” complains Argenis Méndez, a local resident.
After visiting La Guaira the day before, interim president Delcy Rodriguez, in power since January after the capture of Nicolas Maduro by the United States, went on Friday under jeers to a collapsed building in a wealthy neighborhood of Caracas.
“Enough with doing political campaigns in the middle of a tragedy like the one we’re living through,” a group of locals and relatives of people trapped under the rubble shouted at her, an AFP journalist reported.”Totally Militarized”
Declared a “disaster zone,” the entire state of La Guaira “is totally militarized,” said his brother Jorge Rodriguez on Friday in a televised message. AFP had observed looting in the area on Thursday.
The government later announced that access to the area would be restricted starting Friday evening.
Opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado called for the release of “all political prisoners,” both civilians and military, “so they can be reunited with their families in these tragic times.”These earthquakes were felt as far away as Colombia and Brazil. Since then, more than 300 aftershocks have been reported. Venezuela is a country at seismic risk, even though no major earthquake had been recorded there since 1997.
On Friday, the World Cup football matches were preceded by moments of silence in tribute to the victims.
Brian CONTRERAS and Leticia PINEDA in Caracas
