Venezuela is saving itself with its own hands

The thanatologist has two dead women at her feet and a daughter who screams, heartbroken, for her mother. One of the corpses has been in the sun for more than an hour, covered with sheets and blankets. Lime has been sprinkled over it to reduce the smell a little. At last, they are going to load the bodies onto a truck, but their names and ID numbers have to be written down so they are not just white bags. Just more of them.

“Does anyone have paper? Something to write with? Anyone!?” the thanatologist shouts in desperation. In Venezuela’s worst tragedy of the last century, there aren’t even labels or markers to put names on the dead.

This Saturday, almost 72 hours after the twin earthquakes that struck the north of the country, La Guaira, the hardest-hit area, smelled of death. The stench, growing stronger by the hour, enters the nose, clings to clothing, backpacks and masks and does not go away. After the announcement of 1,492 fatalities, authorities spent Saturday collecting as many as 20 dead per hour, according to official sources. There is nowhere to put them. Delcy Rodríguez’s government has improvised eight new morgues where bodies are being piled up. The chances of finding people alive are dwindling and what remains under the rubble remains a mystery. It will take weeks, or even months, to clear the remains of the dozens of buildings reduced to rubble.

Getting to the area from Caracas normally takes just over 40 minutes, but these days it has taken hours. Thousands of people wanted to go and help. The journey through the city reveals green spaces filled with families who have set up makeshift camps, huge towers that look as if they had melted, swimming pools hanging over cliffs, entire buildings folded in on themselves, and many Venezuelans carrying shovels on their shoulders.

There are also public workers — the same ones who sweep the streets or build the roads. Humble people. Exhausted. In shock. And, above all, sad. The scale of the tragedy has overwhelmed everyone.

In La Guaira, a seaside holiday spot on the Caribbean, the noise of motorcycles, trucks and backhoes is constant, but from time to time, there is near-total silence. When everyone falls quiet and turns off their engines, there is hope. It is because a moan has been heard. A cry. And then someone, with bare hands and a construction helmet, crawls into the rubble to find the source of the sound.

That happened several times on Saturday. Faced with a cry coming from a 10-story building, so tilted it looked as though it might collapse at any moment, a young man went into the entrails of the debris without thinking. People waited for him, holding their breath, until he came out with trembling legs and covered in dust. Broken. Several people had to aid him, washing his face with water, putting alcohol under his nose and supporting him. “I can’t get this smell off me,” he said. The young man did not find the source of the cry: “Only blood and bodies.”

Precariousness reigns in this apocalypse. “Don’t leave,” the thanatologist pleads without a notebook. “You have to show how we’re doing this with nothing. They say a lot of international help has arrived, but I haven’t seen any here. It’s a disaster and we can’t do this alone.”

In La Guaira, there is not even alcohol to disinfect wounds. Thousands of residents are without power and without water. They warm plates with candles; they cannot flush toilets. Here, stretchers are wooden doors. Body bags are sheets, and the hearse vehicles are pickup trucks that, until recently, were used to pursue environmental crimes and animal abuse — or in reality, any truck that can carry a body. Where there should be refrigerated units, there is lime, scattered by a passing truck.

In the disaster zone, there are 25,000 Venezuelan officers and 2,741 international rescuers, and everything, authorities say, is coordinated. But on the street, it is hard to know who is in charge. In another rescue attempt, when everyone was silent, a police officer emerged from the shattered building, angry: “Bah! There are 300 bastards giving orders over there.”

The role of the military in this tragedy remains puzzling. There is one in charge of the emergency and uniformed personnel are everywhere, but they are not seen with shovels — instead they are in the streets directing traffic, standing in groups talking, or controlling certain areas. Or at least trying to.

On Saturday, a major from the Bolivarian militia — the reserve — appeared shaking with anger at the entrance of a residential complex under his command. He stood there, small in front of a 20-story building, looked up and shouted: “We are not responsible if something happens to you!” Several people had slipped past his men, trying to recover their belongings despite the risk of collapse.

“We already said they couldn’t go in until inspectors come; the aftershock activity is very constant, slight but constant,” the major explains. They warned them, but no one listened, the uniformed men justify themselves. And it doesn’t seem they tried very hard to enforce it. It feels like the world turned upside down: the military, which for years has instilled so much fear in Venezuela, now cannot even prevent residents from crossing the doorway they themselves are guarding.

Amid the remains of another building, facing the sea, two Navy officers admitted their exhaustion. “We’ve been going on four days without sleep,” one says, warning that he could get in trouble if he says too much. He admits he has cried these days when meeting up with his family. The other says he hasn’t even had time. “We weren’t prepared for this. We don’t have the means,” he acknowledges. “And we were coming from the January 3 bombing,” he adds, referring to the early morning when the United States struck to take Venezuela president Nicolás Maduro.

Alvear Rodríguez, 78, appears with his right arm bandaged, where a huge bruise shows and a nail pierces the bone. He walks wearily, carrying two plastic bags of food and asks for a ride to the house where a neighbor is sheltering him. He tells his story in the car, along a route full of blocked streets and chaotic traffic. On Wednesday, the day of the earthquake, a woman had told him that his relatives’ apartment had burned, and it was unknown whether his family had been inside.

“I’m diabetic and this has me beside myself,” he says. The old man set out on foot, going through apartments asking for his loved ones, and no one knew anything. “I was already about to break down crying,” he says as he passes that cluster of humble homes — still standing but charred — where his daughter lived with her family. He found them alive.

At the end of the route is Juan Manuel Chirino, a thin, humble man who has spent three days without leaving the sidewalk in front of the building that swallowed his family: his son — also Juan Manuel — his daughter-in-law, Jemily Hernández, and two grandchildren, aged six and 10.

He says that when the two were pulled out, they were embracing each other. He says he saw them. And he stands there disoriented, not knowing where to go, asking for them to be handed over. They send him from one hospital to another, telling him to come back tomorrow, that there is no vehicle to transport the bodies. His family was pulled out by neighbors with their bare hands, before anyone in authority had arrived to decide who could enter and who could not. And when they found them, there was probably no paper or pen to write down their names.

Chirino shifts from crying to indignation: “These people weren’t killed by the earthquake. They were killed by the government.”

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