The death toll from last Wednesday's twin earthquakes in Venezuela climbed to 1,450 on Sunday, National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez said, as the 72-hour window that aid agencies consider critical for pulling people alive from collapsed buildings closed and the operation in the coastal state of La Guaira began to shift from rescue to recovery.
The official tally is roughly six times the 235 figure reported Thursday and follows a weekend in which international teams pulled at least 33 people from the debris, including a father and son who had spent four days under a collapsed building near Caracas, a mother and her 18-day-old son in La Guaira, and a nine-month-old baby lifted out by a U.S. search-and-rescue task force from Virginia. With more than 46,000 people still unaccounted for on a government missing-persons site and access to heavy equipment thin in the hardest-hit districts, the coming days will test acting President Delcy Rodriguez's young government and the willingness of Venezuelans to credit any rescue figure it produces.
What changed Sunday
Jorge Rodriguez, in a televised address, put the injured at 3,150 and said 12,721 people had been displaced. He described the disaster as "the most brutal natural disaster" the country had suffered in its history and said Venezuela was "in critical hours, in crucial hours to continue rescuing lives and to build camps where those people who have lost their homes, or who cannot return, for whatever reason, to their residences can stay."
Delcy Rodriguez, in a separate address, said search-and-rescue operations would not be suspended. "We recovered people alive today," she said. The acting president, a former vice president who took office in January after the U.S. capture and removal of Nicolas Maduro, also said electricity, water and road access had been largely restored in La Guaira, the narrow coastal strip north of Caracas where most of the destruction is concentrated.
The four-day rescues
A United States, French and Venezuelan team pulled a man and his son from a La Guaira building Sunday morning, four days after the quakes struck. Both were carried on a black tarp into an ambulance and given intravenous fluids for hydration, NBC News reported.
Hours earlier, Virginia Urban Search and Rescue Task Force 1 freed a mother and her nine-month-old baby from another collapsed structure. The State Department posted video of a helmeted rescuer lifting the crying infant, wrapped in blue fabric, from the rubble, writing on X: "Against impossible odds, hope endures." The Virginia team said both survivors had "only minor injuries." A Colombian crew using a scanner located an 11-year-old boy about 10 feet beneath the debris and carried him out with a broken arm; his mother and sister were killed.
The BBC reported the rescue of Dayana Patino and her 18-day-old son Juan David, who had been trapped in their eighth-floor apartment in La Guaira since Wednesday. Patino told the broadcaster her son gave her "motivation to be awake and alert."
"As long as he was alive, I was going to be alive. Every now and then I was touching his nose for proof that he was still breathing," she said. Her husband Gerson, who had jumped a fence to safety as the building collapsed, described the moment rescuers reached his family as "a miracle."
Foreign teams arrive
The United Nations humanitarian affairs office said Saturday that 44 international urban search-and-rescue teams, with 2,245 specialists and 140 search dogs, had been deployed. Israeli rescuers landed Monday.
U.S. Southern Command said about 100 airmen were sent to expand traffic at Simon Bolivar International Airport, which reopened two runways Saturday after several days closed, and roughly 130 Marines were dispatched to help reopen the port at La Guaira. The amphibious ship USS Fort Lauderdale is in position off the coast, and Army helicopters are flying supplies inland. The State Department has announced $150 million in aid and, according to a senior administration official, expects to add a further nine-figure package.
Frustration on the ground
Residents continued to dig with shovels, ropes and bare hands. Jorge Rodriguez said more than 14,000 military personnel and police officers had been deployed, but many in the disaster zone said they had seen little of that presence. Civilians blocked an excavator from leaving one site after state workers took selfies in front of flattened buildings and left without helping, the Associated Press reported.
"My family has been here since Wednesday after what happened," Oraimis Rodriguez Ramirez, part of a family that organized itself as a rescue brigade, told NBC News outside a collapsed building in Caracas. "We have no answers, there's no organization."
In the city of Maiquetia, a woman threw herself to the ground to shield a package of diapers from a crowd. In Catia La Mar, a La Guaira neighborhood with more than 200 housing towers, people carried off toilet paper and food from stores, and a pharmacy parking lot became a makeshift shelter of tarps and hammocks.
The political weight
The disaster lands on a government still establishing itself. Delcy Rodriguez took office in January after Washington removed Maduro, and many Venezuelans continue to reject the legitimacy of the political movement she represents. NBC News reported that frustration has mounted over what many saw as an inadequate state response; the government counters that food, water and security have been delivered and that international assistance is being absorbed as fast as it arrives. Neither claim is fully verifiable from the disaster zone.
With the 72-hour window now past, attention is turning to the recovery of bodies, the count of the missing, and shelter for the displaced. The U.N. teams and U.S. military deployments are expected to remain in country through the coming week, and additional aid is due to land at Simon Bolivar International Airport in the days ahead.