$1,200 a day: What it costs to keep digging for loved ones in Venezuela
Venezuelan baseball star Eliezer Alfonzo sets up his own rescue operation in La Guaira to search for his wife and daughter
A tiny, frightened Yorkshire terrier was pulled alive from the debris 10 days after an apartment block came down in Venezuela’s earthquake disaster, and footage of the rescue spread across social media throughout the country.
Behind the rescue effort is Eliezer Alfonzo, a national baseball star who has set up his own rescue camp in a parking lot in La Guaira, the area hardest hit by the twin earthquakes of June 24. Alfonzo has miners, food supplies, five pieces of heavy machinery and 50 men under his command. Faced with the state’s shortcomings, he has assembled his own logistics operation.
The mission was to find his wife, Patricia, and his 16-year-old daughter, Eliana — alive or dead.
On Saturday there was still hope: if the dog survived 10 days beneath the debris, perhaps they had too. But on Sunday that hope vanished. Their bodies were found in the rubble.
Money buys speed and time. Alfonzo was able to bring in machinery from Puerto La Cruz, a five-hour drive away, hire workers from the gold mines of Tumeremo, men used to working underground, and keep his private army fed and supplied with vitamin-infused serum, including the machinery operators, who work from 6 a.m. until 2 a.m.
A crane, a hydraulic hammer, a wheel loader, a debris-clearing blade and lighting equipment that made it possible to keep digging through the night. About $1,200 a day per machine.
Alfonzo is one of the Venezuelans who have been spending whatever they can these days to search for their loved ones because the wait is simply too long. Yet even with all those resources — with the contacts his fame has brought him and the money to keep the operation going — he was still searching 10 days later.
Alfonzo was a Major League star with the San Francisco Giants, and in Venezuela he is known as “El Matatán,” the king of home runs. He is now manager of Los Delfines de La Guaira. For the past three months, he had been staying with the team at the Eduard’s Suites Hotel, whose ruins he has spent days combing through.
His fame and resources have not spared him the anguish shared by so many others searching for loved ones. “I am devastated,” he told EL PAÍS on Saturday. “I feel powerless for not seeing the results of so much effort.”
On the first day after the twin earthquakes, no help arrived. “The human resources were us,” recalled the player’s sister, Hensily Alfonzo.
They dug with their bare hands until, on the second day, the machinery that Alfonzo had personally arranged and paid for began to arrive. The family themselves ended up directing the excavators because the operators had no experience dealing with a collapsed building.
“We ended up directing traffic ourselves, by instinct,” she said.
Most of those affected cannot afford that kind of money in Venezuela. “Many people said: when Eliezer gets whatever he needs, we’ll leave, because we have no one,” Hensily says of the neighbors who were counting on her brother’s machinery to help search nearby buildings. “We’ve been here 10 days and found nothing. Imagine without machines.”
The official death toll from the disaster, updated on Sunday, rose to 3,342, with 16,740 people injured. Another 6,462 people have been rescued alive, while 17,345 lost their homes. La Guaira, where Alfonzo was searching, was the hardest-hit: eight out of every 10 buildings that collapsed completely in the earthquakes were located there.
On Saturday, after finding the little dog Sandina, rescuers began to find some of the family’s belongings: the daughter’s phone, the wife’s phone, a suitcase, a watch, a wallet… Eliezer moved around the camp dejected.
“I can’t say I’ve been abandoned, because I did what I had to do,” he said. “But I think the search effort would have been much larger if there had been more support.”
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