标签： South America

In the wake of a devastating earthquake that shook Venezuela’s coastal region, a remarkable story of survival has emerged from the wreckage of a fallen structure in La Guaira. First responders, working alongside local civilian volunteers, pulled a woman out alive from beneath the compacted rubble of a collapsed building, defying overwhelming odds in the aftermath of the seismic disaster.

The earthquake, which caused widespread structural damage across parts of the country, left many buildings unstable and trapped residents beneath fallen concrete and debris. Rescue teams have been working around the clock since the tremor hit, searching through rubble piles for any signs of life. The successful extraction of the woman comes as a rare moment of hope amid a crisis that has brought destruction and uncertainty to affected communities. While details about the woman’s identity, her condition after rescue, and the full extent of her ordeal have not yet been released, the rescue has already been celebrated by on-site crews and local residents as a testament to the persistence of rescue workers and the power of collective community action in times of disaster.

Two massive back-to-back earthquakes, measuring magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5, struck Venezuela on Wednesday evening, leaving a trail of widespread destruction, hundreds dead, and thousands of families trapped in agonizing uncertainty as they search for missing loved ones. By late Thursday, Venezuelan Health Minister Carlos Alvarado confirmed the national death toll had climbed to approximately 235, with no fewer than 4,300 people recorded as injured. Experts note these quakes rank among the most powerful seismic events to hit the South American nation in over a century, and officials warn casualty numbers will likely continue to rise as rescue teams reach remote and hard-hit areas.

Across hard-hit regions such as La Guaira state, located just north of the capital Caracas, rescue teams and local residents have been digging through the rubble of collapsed structures by hand, desperate to pull survivors from the wreckage. For thousands of relatives both inside Venezuela and among the 8 million Venezuelan migrants living abroad, broken and patchy communication infrastructure has turned social media and independent online registries into the only reliable lifeline for information about missing family members.

Official government data on missing persons lags far behind crowdsourced independent records, which document as many as 40,000 unaccounted-for people across the country. Relatives have flooded platforms including WhatsApp, Facebook, and X with digital missing person flyers, pairing photos of their loved ones with last known locations and contact details in the hope that someone, somewhere, has information.

One of those sharing appeals from abroad is 31-year-old Vanesa Marcano, who posted photos of her missing uncle and aunt from her home in Madrid. The couple, who reside in heavily damaged La Guaira, had been hosting their daughter and 7-year-old grandson, who were visiting from the United States. All four have not been heard from since the quakes struck. “It’s a feeling of impotence and uncertainty,” Marcano explained in a phone interview. “I know you must stay calm and focus on the actions you can take. But it’s very easy to fall into despair.” From thousands of miles away, she says she can do little more than share posts and wait for updates, even as she tries to stay calm for her 1-year-old daughter.

For Venezuelans inside the country, the search effort was initially complicated by long-standing restrictions on social media platforms. Back in August 2024, then-President Nicolás Maduro had blocked access to X and messaging app Signal to suppress communication among opponents disputing his claim of victory in that year’s presidential election. By January 2025, Maduro was captured and removed from power by U.S. forces, with former Vice President Delcy Rodríguez stepping into the role of acting president, but the platform restrictions remained in place immediately after the quakes.

On Thursday, the United Nations human rights mission to Venezuela issued an urgent public statement calling on the acting government to lift the social media blocks, noting that timely access to accurate, actionable information is a critical factor that can save lives in disaster response. Shortly after the U.N. appeal, access to X was restored for users within Venezuela, a shift that has already helped speed up the sharing of missing person appeals and rescue updates.

In Catia La Mar, a northern coastal city hard hit by the quakes, Jhoyser Concalves lost contact with his partner and her daughter just minutes before the shaking began. It was the last conversation he would have with them. When the seismic activity stopped, Concalves rushed to their sixth-floor apartment, only to find the entire building reduced to rubble. He shared a missing person flyer on X and Facebook, holding out hope that his family will be found alive: “They are pulling people out of the building alive. So I still have hope that they are in there alive.”

For the large Venezuelan diaspora, these platforms are an even more critical lifeline. Millions of Venezuelans who left the country in recent years have been unable to travel to the disaster zone to join search efforts, leaving them dependent on online updates. Elibel Tovar Lanas, a 38-year-old Venezuelan who has lived in Chile for 23 years, was scheduled to meet his 70-year-old father Saturday for their first reunion in a decade. His father, Félix Ramón Tovar Hernández, had been in La Guaira for business when the quakes hit, and Lanas has had no word of his fate since. “I feel powerless because I don’t know how this is affecting him: the shock, the decisions he’s having to make, whether he is physically okay, or even whether he is still alive,” Lanas said via WhatsApp from Chile. “Being in Chile makes it very difficult to get information, and everything we see feels confusing.”

As rescue efforts stretch into a second day, families across Venezuela and across the globe remain stuck between fragile hope and crippling uncertainty, clinging to digital appeals as their best chance of finding their loved ones alive.

Fresh aerial imagery captured this week has laid bare the full scale of destruction along Venezuela’s northern coastline, where two powerful back-to-back earthquakes triggered catastrophic structural failure on Wednesday.

The port city of La Guaira, which sits just north of the Venezuelan capital Caracas along the rugged Caribbean shore, has borne the brunt of the seismic activity. Multiple multi-story residential and commercial buildings across the city have crumpled, leaving piles of concrete and twisted steel where intact structures stood just days prior. Surveys conducted by aerial drones and aircraft have allowed emergency response teams to map the full scope of the damage, much of which was difficult to access from the ground in the immediate aftermath of the quakes.

The two major tremors, which struck within hours of one another, sent panicked residents running into open spaces across the coastal region. Local authorities have not yet released full casualty figures or details of the full impact to infrastructure, but the aerial footage makes clear that the damage is widespread. The disaster comes as Venezuela already grapples with long-running economic challenges that have stretched emergency response and public works capabilities thin, raising concerns about the speed and scope of recovery efforts in the coming weeks.

In the wake of two powerful consecutive earthquakes that struck northern Venezuela on Wednesday evening, local communities launched urgent, grassroots search efforts Thursday, digging through collapsed rubble by hand to locate missing loved ones as officials confirmed a rising death toll and thousands of injuries across the affected region.

By late Thursday, Venezuela’s Health Minister Carlos Alvarado confirmed to state media that the official casualty count had climbed to 235 fatalities, with at least 4,300 people injured. With thousands still reported unaccounted for and search operations continuing around the clock, authorities warn the final death toll is likely to rise further.

Measuring 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude respectively, the back-to-back quakes rank among the strongest seismic events to hit Venezuela in more than a century, with shaking felt across the entire Caribbean region. The coastal state of La Guaira, located just north of the capital Caracas, bore the brunt of the destruction, bearing the highest concentration of damage and casualties. As the site of Venezuela’s main international airport, facility closures from structural damage have created major logistical barriers for incoming aid and rescue teams.

Survivors described scenes of utter devastation Thursday morning: entire buildings reduced to skeletal frames, multi-story structures flattened, cracked roads split open, and debris scattered across residential neighborhoods. State television broadcast dramatic rescue footage, including the extraction of a woman who survived being trapped under a concrete slab, with only her foot visible to rescuers before she was pulled free alive. But many residents reported a noticeable lack of official government search teams outside the capital in the critical early hours after the disaster.

Dayana Delgado, a mother of three whose 8-year-old son remains missing, publicly questioned where the heavy rescue machinery promised by government officials had gone, noting that local residents were leading the search through crumpled building remains on their own. “I want to know where my child is, if he’s trapped or in a shelter,” Delgado said. In one harrowing scene, a mother collapsed in uncontrollable grief after the bodies of her 3-year-old and 10-year-old children were recovered from the rubble, while other survivors screamed names of missing loved ones or stood in stunned silence.

Hundreds of Caracas residents spent Wednesday night huddled together in open public spaces including parks and parking lots, too afraid to return to damaged or structurally unstable buildings. Families posted handwritten missing person flyers with photos of lost relatives, while Venezuelans living abroad struggled to contact family back home after widespread damage disrupted cellular and phone service across the hardest-hit areas.

La Guaira has a long history of catastrophic natural disasters: in 1999, devastating mudslides killed thousands of people in the region, in one of Venezuela’s deadliest natural events on record. Venezuelan authorities have confirmed they are reallocating rescue teams from across the country to reinforce search efforts in La Guaira. Cristian Carreño, a La Guaira resident, surveyed his damaged apartment building, which now leans dangerously to one side after the quakes. “I lost everything,” Carreño said. “There are people still inside, I imagine, that couldn’t get out. It’s incredibly devastating.”

Retired schoolteacher Juan Alberto Mendaño, who was navigating through wreckage in search of survivors, encountered a dead body on his path before spotting a trapped woman signaling for help with her hand. “May God rescue her as quickly as possible,” Mendaño said. “When we heard the scream, there was nothing we could do without proper equipment.”

The disaster comes as Venezuela already grapples with more than a decade of severe economic instability and deep political division, adding an enormous new challenge to acting President Delcy Rodríguez, who took office in January following the detention of former President Nicolás Maduro. Rodríguez, whose governing movement faces widespread questioning of its legitimacy from much of the Venezuelan public, declared a national state of emergency in a national address Wednesday night, announcing the creation of a $200 million reconstruction fund earmarked for damaged hospitals and residential buildings. On Thursday, she made a public appeal to private businesses to donate heavy construction equipment to support rescue operations. “We hope to rescue as many living people as possible,” Rodríguez said.

Geoscientists explain that while Venezuela sits adjacent to multiple tectonic fault lines, its location straddling the South American and Caribbean plates means major earthquakes are far less common here than in other high-risk parts of Latin America. The U.S. Geological Survey confirmed both quakes were centered near Morón, a coastal Caribbean city roughly 170 kilometers west of Caracas. Marcos Ferreira, a geophysicist and researcher at the Geological Survey of Brazil, noted that the consecutive timing and shallow depth of the quakes amplified their destructive force dramatically. “It is as if I am screaming and then someone starts screaming, too. That amplifies the vibration and adds to the potential hazard,” Ferreira explained.

Shortly after United Nations officials called on the Venezuelan government to lift social media restrictions to allow citizens to access life-saving emergency information, platform X (formerly Twitter) was restored for users across the country. The site had been blocked by Maduro’s administration since August 2024, implemented to suppress information sharing among opponents of his contested claim of victory in July’s presidential election.

Multiple foreign governments have already pledged emergency assistance to Venezuela, with leaders from Mexico, Qatar, Brazil, Spain, Portugal and Canada confirming aid shipments are en route. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who spoke with Rodríguez shortly after the disaster, said the U.S. was immediately deploying emergency support, while acknowledging that the closure of the main international airport creates significant logistical hurdles. “We have a whole-of-government response. It’ll be big; it’ll be fast; and it’ll be effective,” Rubio said.

By Thursday, rescue teams from Mexico, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic had already arrived in the country, alongside an aid flight carrying emergency supplies from Mexico. “No country is prepared to provide the full response that’s needed. That’s what neighboring countries are there for,” said Dominican Air Force Major Carlos Olivares.

Venezuela’s large global diaspora has also mobilized to support relief efforts. In Ecuador, Venezuelan expat Félix Rodríguez has turned his retail store into a local donation collection point, receiving contributions from fellow Venezuelans and local Ecuadorians alike. “My business is always ready for whatever Venezuela needs,” Rodríguez said, adding he wished all affected Venezuelans “faith and fortitude.”

Reporting was contributed by AP journalists across multiple international locations including Mexico City, Quito, Bogota, Sao Paulo, San Juan, Buenos Aires, San Diego and New York.

One day after a pair of powerful back-to-back earthquakes rocked Venezuela, rescue teams are working tirelessly across affected regions to search for survivors even as communities across the country come together to grieve and offer prayers for those impacted by the disaster. Reporting from the capital city of Caracas, BBC correspondent Vanessa Silva has documented the immediate aftermath of the tremors, which have left communities reeling from structural damage, disrupted basic services, and widespread uncertainty.

Emergency response crews have fanned out across hardest-hit neighborhoods, clearing rubble from collapsed buildings and checking damaged infrastructure to locate any people trapped following the quakes. Local volunteers have joined official rescue efforts, bringing supplies, medical support, and comfort to displaced residents who have been forced to leave their damaged homes. Across Caracas and surrounding areas, residents have gathered in small groups to share information about missing loved ones and offer prayers for the recovery effort, creating a wave of collective solidarity amid the chaos.

The successive tremors caught many residents off guard, with aftershocks continuing to keep communities on edge in the hours following the initial quakes. Authorities have urged residents to remain cautious as assessment teams work to map the full scale of damage to homes, roads, and public facilities. As the rescue operation moves into its second day, the focus remains on pulling survivors from damaged structures and providing critical aid to thousands of people affected by the seismic event.