Rescue teams in Venezuela cling to hope as US rebuffs criticisms of government earthquake response
CATIA LA MAR, Venezuela (AP) — The stench of decomposing bodies hung heavy over streets of flattened buildings Thursday as rescue missions to find survivors of Venezuela’s devastating earthquakes increasingly turned to the recovery of corpses.
Desperate for good news, Venezuelan and international emergency workers celebrated the near-miraculous rescue of a 43-year-old security guard found alive after nearly eight days under the rubble — five days beyond the critical 72-hour mark following a quake when experts say finding survivors is most likely.
National broadcasters reran footage of the exuberant moment he was pried free from the collapsed mall and lifted onto a stretcher as crowds, including rescuers from 10 countries, embraced one another and cheered. Trapped in an air pocket beneath the concrete, Hernán Alberto Gil Flores survived on the food and water that rescuers managed to pass him through crevices.
But elsewhere across the hardest-hit state of La Guaira, where thousands remain missing, an air of hopelessness was setting in. The port city of Catia La Mar teemed with officials carrying body bags and stacking caskets. Throughout the day, onlookers thronged international rescue teams as they scoured crumpled buildings in response to tips about possible survivors, retreating deflated when the crew's seismic sensors detected no signs of life.
The government of acting President Delcy Rodríguez, whose response to the earthquake has been widely criticized as slow and disorganized, has counted at least 2,295 people killed by the earthquake and more than 11,000 injured.
With thousands sleeping in crowded shelters or outside, doctors have voiced concern that the fallout could pave the way for a widening medical crisis of untreated injuries and infectious diseases in a healthcare system already on the brink.
Hours before the twin earthquakes hit on June 24, Daniel Alejandro Núñez Ramírez, 28, landed in the capital of Caracas on a deportation flight of more than a hundred Venezuelans expelled from the U.S.
It was a fraught homecoming for Núñez Ramírez, who applied for asylum in the U.S. after arriving in 2022 and built a life in Florida before he was taken into immigration custody in May. From the airport, Núñez Ramírez and his fellow deportees were ferried to a hotel in La Guaira that looked like a prison, he told his mother, Oswadeliz Nuñez, in a brief phone call.
“That’s when I found out my son had arrived ... that he had a number, that he was wearing a bracelet — like a prisoner — and that they were moving him around in handcuffs," Oswadeliz Nuñez told The Associated Press.
Around thirty minutes after they hung up, the earth began to shake. Most of the 146 Venezuelan deportees in the hotel were buried. On Monday, Oswadeliz Nuñez received a call asking her to retrieve her son's remains at a morgue in La Guaira.
“My son was not a criminal. Why do they treat people with no criminal record like criminals?" she asked.
If her son had come home to her in Caracas, instead of being sent to the holding facility in La Guaira, he might still be alive, she said, holding a red box of his ashes. "I don't want this death to go unpunished.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it turned over responsibility for the deportees to the Venezuelan government after the flight landed.
Faced with complaints that foreign crews and civilians have shouldered most of the rescue efforts, Rodríguez sought to defend the government response a day before the extension of her 180-day mandate as acting leader was set to expire.
Rodríguez served as deputy to former President Nicolás Maduro until he was ousted by the U.S. in January and became interim leader with the backing of the Trump administration.
With transparency scant across the Venezuelan government, it was unclear what would happen once the deadline passes Friday.
Under Venezuela’s constitution, temporary absences are to be filled by the vice president — which was Rodríguez’s former role — for up to 90 days. These interim appointments can be extended by the national assembly for an additional 90 days.
The National Assembly, controlled by Rodríguez’s party, can trigger a snap election if lawmakers declare the post permanently vacant.
Since the U.S. capture of Maduro, the Trump administration has expanded its role in Venezuelan affairs — a seismic shift in relations between the long-adversarial nations.
The U.S. has thrown its support behind Rodríguez and largely turned its back on opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, who this week accused Rodríguez’s government of blocking her return to the country.
Washington has also sought to remake Venezuela’s lucrative energy industry and opened the door for Venezuela’s state oil company to sell fuel to U.S. companies.
The U.S. has committed over $300 million and deployed some 900 military personnel to support rescue and relief efforts.
John M. Barrett, the U.S. chargé d’affaires to Venezuela, said that revenue from Venezuelan oil production, controlled by the U.S. Treasury since Maduro's seizure, is also being made available for relief efforts.
The State and Treasury Department teams were working “to make sure that those funds are made available for this specific reconstruction effort, including for shelter, sanitation, health and energy generation,” Barrett said. Venezuela’s oil and gas production was not directly impacted by the earthquakes and production continues to increase, he added.
Oversight of where that money flows is crucial, said Laura Cristina Dib, Venezuela program director at the independent human rights organization Washington Office on Latin America.
“There are a lot of transparency questions that linger on the use of that fund in a moment in which Venezuelans really need that money to be used for the protection of Venezuelans," she said. In recent months, it has been difficult to track how the U.S. was spending the seized oil revenue.
When asked about public anger the Venezuelan government's earthquake response, U.S. officials have been nothing but effusive about their support for Rodríguez.
“What I can say with confidence is that the local authorities have fully complied with our requests and have accelerated this massive humanitarian response,” Barrett said.
___
Janetsky reported from Mexico City. Associated Press journalists Ben Finley in Washington D.C, Gabriela Aoun Angueira in San Diego, Gisela Salomon in Miami and Isabel DeBre in Buenos Aires, Argentina, contributed to this report.
___
Corrects that the deadline for the acting president expires on Friday, not Thursday.
© Copyright The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in this news report may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
