标签： South America

A frantic race against time is unfolding across Venezuela’s coastal state of La Guaira, where back-to-back massive earthquakes have left a trail of unprecedented destruction, leaving thousands dead, missing, and trapped beneath crumbling infrastructure. On Wednesday, a magnitude 7.2 quake was followed just hours later by a 7.5 tremor — one of the most powerful seismic events recorded in Venezuela in the past 100 years — turning entire neighborhoods into mounds of concrete and twisted metal debris. To date, national officials have confirmed at least 1,430 fatalities, a number that climbs steadily with every passing hour, and the United Nations estimates that roughly 50,000 people remain unaccounted for.

Against this backdrop of ruin, untrained residents are leading much of the initial search effort, digging through rubble with bare hands, rusted shovels, and whatever makeshift tools they can scrounge up, with little to no heavy rescue equipment to aid their work. Drones operated by local volunteers scan hard-to-reach sections of collapsed structures from above, while crowds of anxious relatives huddle around live video feeds, scanning the rubble for any small, familiar trace of a missing loved one: a fragment of clothing, a personal belonging, any sign that might confirm they are still alive. Soldiers and international rescue teams repeatedly call for silence across search zones, pausing all activity to listen for faint taps, voices, or groans that could signal a survivor trapped beneath the wreckage.

Stories of heartbreak and desperate hope are scattered across the disaster zone. Jesús Suárez traveled more than 200 kilometers from his home to Catia La Mar, one of La Guaira’s hardest-hit coastal towns, to search for his 20-something son Jean, who he believes remains trapped under a fallen apartment building. “There’s no information at all. People who know him say they didn’t see him come out or anything,” Suárez explained, gesturing toward the unstable pile of rubble. “I believe he might be in there. But it’s impossible to rescue him… There is no sophisticated equipment here. A human being alone cannot do it – it’s too dangerous.”

For the family of 31-year-old Carlos Eduardo, who is also trapped, there is a fragile thread of hope: an hour and a half before they spoke to reporters, they heard him groan from beneath the debris, a sign he was still alive after similar moments of sound followed by silence the day before. “And so here we are, waiting for help, hoping we can get him out alive,” his cousin told BBC News Mundo.

Humanitarian experts warn that the first 48 to 72 hours after a major seismic event are the most critical window for rescuing survivors alive, though that window can extend if trapped people have access to clean water and food. Venezuelan national assembly president Jorge Rodríguez emphasized the government’s commitment to transparency in the wake of the disaster, saying “Every person saved is a miracle. We will not hide anything about the scale of this tragedy.” Interim President Delcy Rodríguez said the government has deployed all available resources to the region, and has distributed emergency food and water to displaced survivors. But the scale of the disaster has overwhelmed local and national rescue capacity, even with the arrival of international assistance.

By Friday, 861 volunteer rescuers from Mexico, the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, El Salvador, Switzerland, Colombia, and other nations had arrived to join the effort, with more teams and supplies en route. Interim President Rodríguez confirmed she had spoken with U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who reaffirmed their commitment to sending additional rescue teams and critical aid supplies. Even with this growing international support, however, many remote neighborhoods in the hardest-hit region have yet to receive any official assistance.

As days pass, new public health risks are emerging. Many survivors report a strong odor of decaying bodies across search zones, raising fears of outbreaks of disease that could put local residents and children at particular risk. “There’s a smell… the dead are already being felt. That’s going to make us and the children sick,” said Glendys Delgado, a La Guaira resident whose neighborhood has not received any government support, even as private volunteers from the capital Caracas have stepped in to bring donated food.

For thousands of displaced survivors, the disaster has erased decades of hard work in an instant. Many are now sleeping in open, public spaces like the damaged but still usable closed Simón Bolívar International Airport car park, where families can avoid the risk of falling debris from damaged structures. Alexandra Gabino, a 28-year-old mother of two young children aged two and seven, lost her entire home in the quake, and is now sleeping in her family’s car alongside her husband and kids. “It’s painful to be left with nothing. My mother lost her home, we lost our home, we have nothing. You try to stay strong for your children,” she said. “Everyone says what matters is that you’re alive – and yes, but everything you’re going through hurts: seeing people suffer, hearing people scream, seeing children trapped, and the helplessness of not being able to do anything because you have to stay and look after your own children. You try to be strong, but it hurts.”

Across the disaster zone, survivors echo the same desperate plea: more help, more equipment, and faster action to pull their loved ones out alive before the critical window for rescue closes. As one survivor put it, after returning to the ruins of her home to retrieve just a single usable appliance: “It’s a very difficult situation, we’re not prepared for this. The sacrifices and efforts you make to achieve things – and in the blink of an eye, everything collapses. But what matters is life. We are waiting for humanitarian aid – we need them to come to help us.”

Rescue teams operating across Venezuela’s earthquake-stricken regions have entered the most high-stakes phase of their operation, with rescue workers and senior correspondents warning that the coming hours will prove decisive in the search for any survivors still trapped beneath rubble.

BBC correspondent Dan Johnson, reporting directly from the shared border between Venezuela and neighboring Colombia, has underscored the acute urgency of the ongoing mission. The narrow window of survival for anyone trapped following a major seismic event narrows rapidly as time passes, making each passing minute critical for extraction teams working to clear debris and reach affected areas. Cross-border coordination between Venezuelan emergency services and Colombian response teams has already been activated, as authorities work to mobilize all available resources to the disaster zone before the critical survival window closes.

Disaster response experts note that after major earthquakes, the first 72 hours are widely considered the ‘golden period’ for rescue operations, when the chances of pulling trapped survivors alive remain highest. With that window rapidly winding down, all available personnel and equipment are being pushed to their limits in this high-stakes race against the clock.

Venezuela is grappling with the devastating aftermath of back-to-back earthquakes that have left thousands homeless, scores missing, and communities across the capital Caracas and coastal regions reeling from widespread destruction. Days after the tremors hit, survivors wake each morning to a grimmer reality, as hopes of finding trapped missing loved ones alive continue to dwindle. Many have spent nights sleeping rough in public spaces, traumatized by nightmares of collapsing structures and haunted by their sudden loss.

For 50-year-old former police officer Jan Carlos Roa Garcia and his family, life has been upended overnight. While their Caracas apartment building did not fully collapse, severe structural damage has rendered it unsafe to reoccupy. Speaking through tears, Garcia said he feels lost about how to rebuild his family’s life after the disaster. “If I were 30 instead of 50, maybe I could start over. But I have no idea where to begin, and up until now, no government official has reached out to us,” he explained. Though exhausted and frustrated, the longtime public servant refrained from harsh public criticism of the official disaster response.

Local musician Zaira Castro, who lives just a block from two leveled buildings in the heavily damaged Chacao district of Caracas, had no such hesitation. “Everyone is deeply frustrated because the government has not delivered the urgent, serious support we need right now,” Castro said from a neighborhood plaza. “Right now, it is ordinary Venezuelans helping each other. We have learned to rely on one another because the government does not exist for us in moments like this.”

When interim president Delcy Rodriguez visited the Chacao area alongside the local mayor to assess the damage, she was met with open anger from displaced residents. One resident yelled at the delegation that officials were “campaigning in the middle of a tragedy” while the government did nothing to support affected families.

The reporter has a personal connection to the damaged area, having lived in Los Palos Grandes, one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods in Chacao, during their time as BBC Venezuela Correspondent. Their former apartment building sits just meters from the collapsed Petunia building, where rescue crews have worked around the clock to reach people trapped under the rubble. A friend recently shared on social media that her mother is among those still missing at the Petunia site. It was a small relief to find the reporter’s former apartment building, Alheli, still standing, with its friendly long-time caretaker Pedro still greeting residents on the front porch. Even among unharmed buildings, residents are shaken: one elderly resident twisted her ankle fleeing during the tremors, and all said they had never experienced a disaster of this scale in Venezuela in their lifetimes.

The desperation is far more acute in the worst-hit regions, particularly the coastal town of La Guaira, where more than 100 buildings have been completely flattened, leaving an apocalyptic landscape. As rescue efforts stretch past the critical 72-hour window, fading hopes have fueled growing public anger. “There are still people trapped under that concrete, we need heavy machinery to reach them,” pleaded Eileen Lada, a La Guaira resident who lost her home. “Please, send help.”

Amid the widespread despair, moments of hope have emerged: rescue teams, both local and international, have pulled several survivors out of the rubble, including a newborn baby rescued in a widely shared operation. Videos circulating on social media show rescue workers celebrating small victories with the characteristic determination and warmth of Venezuelan people, moments that have moved viewers across the country.

Local hospitals along the northern coast are already stretched to breaking point. Venezuela’s healthcare system has suffered from decades of systemic underfunding, and it is now being forced to respond to a disaster that would overwhelm even better-resourced nations. Doctors and nurses are working tirelessly in impossible conditions to treat the injured, but survivors’ accounts of their experiences paint a grim picture. “It was horrific – so many people dead, so many family members missing,” Maria Vargas, a survivor recovering from her injuries in a hospital bed, told AFP. “I lost my entire home, but we are alive, thank God.”

The first 48 hours after an earthquake, widely considered the most critical window for rescuing trapped survivors, has long passed. For a country that has already endured years of political and economic crisis, this disaster now stands as one of the darkest moments in Venezuela’s modern history.

A stunning story of survival has emerged from the wreckage of catastrophic seismic events that struck Venezuela this Wednesday, as rescue teams pulled a newborn baby alive from collapsed building rubble. The remarkable rescue comes in the wake of a devastating natural disaster that shook the South American nation: two massive earthquakes struck mere seconds apart, leaving a trail of death and destruction across affected regions. As of the latest official updates, the confirmed death toll from the twin quakes has climbed to at least 920 people, with many more still missing or injured amid the flattened structures and broken infrastructure. Emergency response teams have been working around the clock to dig through debris, searching for any signs of life trapped beneath the ruins, and the successful extraction of the newborn has provided a glimmer of hope to communities shattered by the disaster. Local authorities and international aid organizations have mobilized resources to support search and rescue efforts, deliver emergency medical care, and provide basic supplies to thousands of people displaced by the quakes.

When two back-to-back intense earthquakes struck Venezuela this week, the scale of destruction laid bare long-documented vulnerabilities in the country’s built environment, rooted in outdated construction, lax enforcement of safety standards and unforgiving geography. Experts confirm the doublet quakes, among the strongest to hit the South American nation in over 100 years, have left at least 910 people dead, a death toll that is projected to climb as rescue teams continue to access hard-hit regions.

Visual analysis from The Associated Press, which reviewed on-the-ground video and high-resolution satellite imagery of affected areas, confirms that dozens of multi-story residential and commercial buildings have crumpled completely. To formalize this damage assessment, Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab applied specialized machine learning damage mapping models to satellite data of Catia La Mar, a Caribbean coastal city in La Guaira state that bore the brunt of the disaster. The AI analysis found that roughly one-third of the city’s nearly 30,000 structures suffered partial or total damage.

Structural engineers and geoscience experts have outlined a cascade of overlapping risk factors that turned the powerful seismic event into a catastrophic disaster. One key issue is the legacy of hurried construction during Venezuela’s recent oil booms, when developers rushed to erect large housing complexes without following modern seismic risk mitigation best practices, experts said.

Many older residential buildings, constructed across the 1950s and 1960s before Venezuela adopted modern earthquake safety codes, were never retrofitted to withstand violent ground shaking. Compounding this structural weakness, a large share of urban development in high-seismic-risk northern Venezuela was built on loose, soft soil that amplifies seismic vibration, raising the likelihood of collapse. According to David Cocke, a California-based structural engineer and former president of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, this combination of soft foundation soil, mid-rise construction and outdated concrete framing created ideal conditions for “pancake collapse,” where floors crumple sequentially on top of one another.

“These older structures lack the reinforced steel connection standards that are mandatory in modern earthquake-resistant building design today,” Cocke explained. Since the 1970s, global engineering standards have required concrete buildings to be reinforced with steel to reduce earthquake vulnerability, but enforcement of retrofitting mandates for older buildings has lagged severely in low- and middle-income countries that prioritize more immediate socioeconomic challenges. While wealthy, seismic-prone nations including Japan, New Zealand and the United States have rolled out mandatory upgrade or demolition programs for high-risk structures, many other countries have not implemented similar rules—a gap that puts millions at risk, Cocke added.

Other experts point to two additional structural flaws that amplified collapse risk: the use of heavy non-structural brick walls, and the prevalence of “soft-story” construction, where ground floors are designed as open parking garages or commercial spaces with minimal load-bearing support. These open lower floors are far more likely to buckle during seismic shaking, triggering full building collapse. “Soft stories are a major global hazard,” noted Eduardo Miranda, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. “In Venezuela, they are extremely common, and when you combine that hazard with soft foundation soil, total collapse becomes far more likely.”

Geophysicists also emphasize that the sequential nature of the two quakes—classified as a seismic doublet—worsened the destruction. Marcos Ferreira, a geophysicist and researcher at the Geological Survey of Brazil, compared the effect to overlapping sound waves: the first quake weakens structures, and the second shaking amplifies the damage, just as two overlapping screams create a louder, more powerful sound. A similar doublet quake event struck Turkey and Syria in 2023, killing nearly 60,000 people.

Notably, even buildings constructed after Venezuela updated its building codes following a deadly 1967 earthquake collapsed in this week’s event, raising urgent questions about enforcement of existing standards. After catastrophic floods and landslides in 1999 that destroyed thousands of homes across coastal northern Venezuela, the Venezuelan government launched a massive rapid construction program to replace destroyed housing and resettle displaced people. Juan Carlos Vielma, a Venezuelan civil engineer who now heads academic affairs at the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso’s civil engineering school in Chile, confirmed that many of these hastily built newer structures also collapsed this week.

“What puzzles me most is that multiple collapsed buildings were designed and constructed recently under current building standards,” Vielma said. “We need to launch a comprehensive process that not only focuses on reconstruction, but also reviews our existing engineering standards and enforcement processes, because it is clear that failures exist within our current systems.”

This reporting includes contributed work from AP writer Mauricio Savarese based in Sao Paulo.

Three days after back-to-back powerful 7.2 and 7.5-magnitude earthquakes devastated northern Venezuela, the race against time to pull trapped survivors from the rubble of flattened homes and apartment blocks is growing exponentially more desperate. As hope for finding more people alive fades, the disaster has left a broken nation grappling with overwhelming human loss, limited government rescue capacity, and growing chaos in the hardest-hit zone centered on La Guaira, just north of the capital Caracas.

By Friday evening, Venezuelan authorities announced a full access restriction to La Guaira, the epicenter of the destruction, after unregulated traffic and chaotic crowds began to obstruct ongoing search-and-rescue operations. Under the new order, all people seeking entry to the area must first obtain official permits, though government officials have released little to no detail on who will qualify for access.

As of midday Friday, official counts placed the confirmed death toll from Wednesday’s twin quakes at more than 920, with over 3,300 people injured and 243 survivors pulled from rubble so far. Independent digital tracking databases list more than 51,000 people as unaccounted for, a figure that includes many displaced residents cut off from communication by collapsed cellphone infrastructure, as well as duplicate missing person reports. Officials have warned that the final death toll will almost certainly rise as search teams clear more debris.

With rescue resources stretched thin across the devastated region, many Venezuelan families have launched their own search efforts for missing loved ones, reporting almost no presence of official state rescue teams in the most heavily damaged zones — a stark contrast to the government’s public claims of a robust, coordinated response. Aid organizations universally recognize the first 48 to 72 hours after a major seismic event as the most critical window for rescuing people alive, though survival can be extended for trapped people with access to clean water and food.

“Each person saved is a miracle,” said Jorge Rodríguez, president of Venezuela’s National Assembly. “We are not going to hide absolutely anything about the magnitude of this tragedy.”

In La Guaira, the scope of grief and urgency is impossible to miss. Nazareth Jimenez collapsed into the shoulder of a family member, sobbing as local neighbors used hand tools and borrowed power saws to cut through thick concrete slabs of what was once a multi-story apartment building, now reduced to a jagged mountain of rubble. Inside were her siblings, nieces, nephews, and close friends, and she waited in agony for any sign of life. “My God, how are we going to get them out of there?” she murmured. Desperate for heavy machinery to move collapsed concrete and steel, she made a public plea: “We’re making a call for help to the government and countries across the world. There are still people alive in there.”

Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, who took office in January after the United States supported the capture and removal of former President Nicolás Maduro, said the Venezuelan government was carrying out a full-scale response during these “critical hours for rescuing people alive.” Government forces have distributed basic food and water to displaced survivors in La Guaira, and Rodríguez confirmed the state has militarized the area, welcomed international rescue teams and humanitarian aid, and that additional support is en route. Still, many local residents say the aid and resources deployed so far are only a tiny fraction of what the devastated region needs.

The massive disaster represents one of the most severe tests of Rodríguez’s acting administration, which already faces the headwinds of a decade-long national economic crisis and widespread public skepticism over the legitimacy of the ruling political movement.

The International Organization for Migration estimates that up to 6.76 million people across the region have been affected by the quakes, with nearly 2 million of those in the capital Caracas alone. Seismology experts note the destruction was amplified by two key factors: the quakes’ shallow depth and their rapid succession, which left little time for survivors to evacuate unstable structures. Loyce Pace, regional director for the International Red Cross in the Americas, said “people are still terrified to reenter what were their homes,” and thousands of displaced residents have taken to sleeping on sidewalks and in open public spaces out of fear of aftershocks and further building collapses.

For many families, the loss is unfathomable. Walking through the rubble that still holds the bodies of two of his children, Omar Reyes shared that around 20 members of his extended family were killed in the disaster. “I’ve been left alone in this life,” he said. In the nearby city of Maiquetia, residents lined up for hours outside the few operating stores and pharmacies, which were only letting customers enter one at a time to avoid overcrowding. At one point, a desperate woman threw herself on top of a package of diapers in the crowd, curling her body around it to protect the supply for her child.

In Catia La Mar, adjacent to Venezuela’s main international airport, some desperate residents have been seen moving basic supplies including toilet paper and food from damaged or abandoned stores, and crowds once swarmed a civilian pickup truck distributing free bread and water before a soldier intervened to restore order. The parking lot of a local pharmacy has been converted into a makeshift displacement camp, with residents using tarps, hammocks, and donated tents for shelter.

Twenty-eight-year-old Yuleidy Cadenas has stood across the street from a collapsed public housing building for days, holding out hope that her son, mother, and brother will be pulled out alive. She fled barefoot from another collapsing building on the day of the quakes, only to return and find her mother’s 12-story apartment tower had completely flattened. “I got on top of the rubble and told them to yell back, and nobody did, not my brother, nor my son or my mother,” Cadenas said.

Disruptions from unregulated traffic and groups of motorcyclists have repeatedly hampered search efforts. Mexican rescue teams and volunteer first responders have repeatedly asked for silence to listen for faint signs of life under rubble, but civilian and uniformed bikers have continued honking horns and revving engines, leaving first responders frustrated.

As the critical 72-hour window closes, international aid has begun arriving in the country. Venezuelan authorities confirmed Friday that 861 rescue volunteers from Mexico, the United States, El Salvador, Switzerland, Colombia and other nations are already on the ground, with more teams en route from other countries. Acting President Rodríguez said she spoke with U.S. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday, and both reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to sending additional rescue teams and heavy aid equipment to support the response effort.

AP correspondent Julia Janetsky reported from Mexico City, with additional contributions from AP journalists Clara Preve in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Dánica Coto in San Juan, Puerto Rico.