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CATIA LA MAR, Venezuela – One week after a pair of devastating earthquakes ripped through Venezuela’s northern coastal region, the acrid stench of smoldering wreckage and decomposing human remains hangs heavy over the flattened neighborhoods of La Guaira state, where international rescue teams continue to cling to faint hopes of pulling more survivors from tons of concrete and rubble.

On Thursday morning, that faint hope became a rare moment of joy cutting through the pervasive despair that has shrouded the hard-hit port city of Catia La Mar. After 100 consecutive hours of painstaking excavation by search-and-rescue teams from across the Americas, crews pulled 43-year-old Hernán Alberto Gil Flores alive from the collapsed ruins of a local shopping mall, where he had been trapped for nearly eight full days. Rescuers say a narrow, stable air pocket kept Gil Flores alive, and he was able to stay hydrated and nourished using supplies that teams lowered through gaps in the rubble before reaching him. As he was carried out on a stretcher and loaded into an awaiting ambulance, crowds of onlookers who had gathered at the site burst into cheers, marking one of the few unqualified victories for rescue teams amid a relentless, devastating recovery effort.

The miracle rescue comes against a backdrop of staggering loss that has left the country reeling. As of Wednesday, Venezuelan government figures put the confirmed death toll at 2,295, with more than 11,000 people injured by the quakes. Thousands more remain unaccounted for, as desperate family members sift through wreckage searching for any sign of missing loved ones. Tens of thousands of displaced residents are now living in overcrowded emergency shelters or sleeping in the open air along the coast, a reality that has medical professionals sounding the alarm over a looming secondary public health crisis. With Venezuela’s already teetering national healthcare system stretched beyond its breaking point, untreated injuries and the spread of infectious disease threaten to push the death toll even higher in the coming weeks.

Beyond the human catastrophe, the disaster has amplified already fierce political pressure on interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez, whose government is facing widespread backlash from Venezuelans over what critics call an inadequate, under-resourced official response to the quakes. On the ground, civilian volunteer teams and international rescue efforts have outpaced official government action, drawing sharp condemnation from citizens grappling with the aftermath.

The criticism comes at a pivotal political moment for Rodríguez: her 180-day mandate as acting president was set to expire at the end of Thursday, leaving the country’s interim leadership status unclear amid a lack of transparency from government officials. Rodríguez, who previously served as vice president to Nicolás Maduro before Maduro was ousted by U.S.-backed opposition in January, has held the interim presidency with formal backing from the Trump administration. Under Venezuela’s constitution, an interim vice presidential appointment can only extend 90 days before requiring an additional 90-day extension from the National Assembly, which is controlled by Rodríguez’s party. If the seat is declared permanently vacant, the assembly has the authority to call a snap national election.

Despite growing domestic discontent over the disaster response, the Trump administration reaffirmed its full support for Rodríguez’s government on Wednesday. U.S. officials confirmed that roughly 900 American military personnel are currently deployed in Venezuela to support rescue and humanitarian relief operations. John M. Barrett, U.S. chargé d’affaires to Venezuela, pushed back against claims that Rodríguez’s administration had politicized disaster response efforts during a press call with reporters. “The U.S. response does require a high level of coordination with local authorities to be successful,” Barrett said. “And what I can say with confidence is that the local authorities have fully complied with our requests and have accelerated this massive humanitarian response.”

Gen. Francis Donovan, head of U.S. Southern Command, added that decades of systemic underinvestment in Venezuelan public infrastructure and social services had created pre-existing conditions that made responding to a disaster of this scale far more difficult for any sitting government. “It is a big problem for any leader to deal with a challenge of this magnitude,” Donovan noted.

Janetsky reported from Mexico City. Associated Press journalist Ben Finley contributed reporting from Washington D.C.

In a stunning tale of survival that has captured global attention, a 43-year-old Venezuelan security guard has been pulled alive from the remains of a collapsed building eight full days after twin earthquakes rocked the South American nation.

Rescue crews pulled Hernan Gil from the wreckage on Thursday, marking an extraordinary outcome for a search effort that many feared would only recover remains after more than a week trapped beneath fallen concrete and mangled infrastructure. The twin seismic events that struck Venezuela triggered the collapse of the multi-story structure where Gil was working, leaving him pinned and cut off from contact with the outside world.

The dramatic rescue, captured on video by emergency responders on the scene, has already spread widely across social media, with many viewers hailing it as a rare moment of hope in the aftermath of a disaster that brought widespread destruction and loss of life across affected regions of the country. Rescue teams have not yet released details on how Gil survived eight days without food, water, or access to open air, but medical teams have already taken him to a local hospital to evaluate his condition.

Eight days after a devastating pair of back-to-back earthquakes shook northern Venezuela, an international coalition of rescue teams pulled off a miraculous early Thursday extraction, pulling a trapped 43-year-old security guard alive from the collapsed rubble of a coastal shopping center. The successful rescue of Hernán Alberto Gil Flores has become a powerful symbol of hope amid widespread destruction that left thousands dead and countless communities shattered.

Gil Flores, a night-shift security guard stationed at the Galerías Playa Grande shopping center in Catia La Mar, a coastal town in the hard-hit La Guaira state, was inside his small on-duty cabin when the first magnitude 7.2 tremor struck on June 24. Just moments later, a second 7.5-magnitude quake hit, triggering the total collapse of the surrounding multi-story concrete structure. In a cruel twist of fate that saved his life, the small prefabricated security cabin remained intact, creating a narrow pocket of breathable air that shielded him from falling crushing debris for eight full days.

Costa Rican Red Cross specialized rescue teams first detected faint signs of life and established contact with Gil Flores over the weekend, sparking a coordinated round-the-clock extraction effort. Led by Chilean urban search and rescue firefighters, the operation brought together expert teams from the United States, Portugal, Mexico and multiple other nations, all united by a shared commitment: leave no survivor behind. “We were never going to leave him here,” confirmed Costa Rican Red Cross rescuer Minyar Collado ahead of the final extraction.

Rescue crews navigated a series of deadly hazards throughout the multi-day effort, including unstable, shifting structural rubble, torrential tropical downpours, and near-constant aftershocks that threatened to trigger further collapses. To keep Gil Flores stable as crews tunneled toward him, teams used a telescopic camera to maintain nonstop communication, and passed bottled water and liquid nutrients through a narrow drilled shaft to sustain him over the final three days of the operation. Veteran Chilean firefighter María Paz Campos talked the survivor through every step of the process, keeping him calm through the final agonizing hours of waiting. In pre-rescue footage released by Chilean firefighters, Gil Flores can be seen passing time sketching, before following instructions to put on protective goggles to shield his eyes from falling fine dust and concrete particles.

In a poignant detail shared by Collado, when rescuers first made contact, Gil Flores asked them not to inform his wife he was alive, worried that she would suffer additional heartbreak if he did not survive the extraction. For his spouse, Gusbimar González, the days after the quakes were filled with unrelenting despair, until the moment she learned the news: “when I learned he was alive, I saw a ray of light in the darkness,” she told the Associated Press. The couple share two children, aged 8 and 10, who had waited anxiously for news of their father.

When rescuers carried Gil Flores out on a stretcher covered with an orange protective tarp, teams from every participating nation broke into cheers, as crowds of onlookers lined the path to a waiting Red Cross ambulance. Members of the Costa Rican Red Cross team embraced each other, laughing through tears of relief at the successful outcome.

The twin June 24 shallow earthquakes that triggered the disaster left an unprecedented trail of destruction across northern Venezuela. More than 2,200 people were killed, over 11,000 were injured, and tens of thousands of buildings across the region were damaged or destroyed. La Guaira state, where Catia La Mar is located, bore the brunt of the catastrophe, but this unlikely rescue has given a shattered community a rare moment of hope in the wake of overwhelming tragedy.