The search for missing bodies after Venezuela’s earthquakes: ‘We all deserve closure to this tragedy’

The day after the La Guaira earthquakes, Liliana Figueroa received this message: “I saw your daughter in a body bag; she had her ID.” The message came from a relative of one of Angelina Guerra Figueroa’s friends. Angelina, 16, was Liliana’s only child.

At the time, Liliana was trying to return to Venezuela from Boa Vista, where for the past four years she had been a long-distance mother. She waited tables in a restaurant in the Brazilian border city to earn an income that her job as a teacher in Venezuela could never have provided. It was a move forced by the economic crisis, but close enough that she could make the two-day journey home by road whenever necessary — such as on that day, when neither Angelina nor her father was answering the phone, and news reports confirmed a disaster, the most devastating Venezuela has experienced in recent memory.

At 5:30 p.m. on June 24, before the twin earthquakes destroyed much of La Guaira, Angelina had sent a video note to her mother — the last message Liliana received from her. The teenager had just had a shower; she was wearing a green sleeveless shirt and a necklace she never took off. She told her mother that a friend had come over to spend part of the holiday afternoon with her, since there were no classes that day, and that her father had made milanesa with spaghetti for lunch.

The three of them were on the second floor of the seven-storey Solymar building in Los Corales, a structure left unrecognizable after more than a minute of violent shaking.

It took Liliana three days to get there. The border crossing at the mining town known as Kilometer 88, near Brazil, had been closed since the military operation in which the United States had allegedly killed the gang leader known as “El Niño Guerrero” in a missile strike. The disaster forced the authorities to reopen it.

As Liliana was passing through the area, she received another message she had been dreading. In the Solymar residents’ WhatsApp group, someone had posted a list of the dead. It included both her former partner, Richard, and Angelina.

The journey back to Venezuela involved roughly 40 hours on buses, a ride from a passing driver to complete part of the route, and a lengthy wait to obtain a special pass allowing her to enter La Guaira. The last time she had been there was in April 2025 for Angelina’s 15th birthday.

This time, she has spent entire days opening body bags in search of a slight frame weighing about 45 kilos, wearing a green top, a necklace, and the decorated nails she knew her daughter had. She looks for perfectly shaped eyebrows and the vaccination mark on her arm. She is also searching for her former partner’s body: a man 12 years older than her, wearing a Venezuela T-shirt and palm-tree-print shorts. Almost all of Richard’s family died in La Guaira.

More than 20 days after their deaths, she still has not found them. The bodies were pulled from the rubble and taken to a hospital. Someone photographed them and added the images to digital albums of the dead that she was able to review on a tablet at the temporary morgue the government set up in the silos of the Port of La Guaira to cope with the thousands killed by the earthquakes.

During an initial search of the digital records, she found an ID-style photograph and a full-body image of Richard. He was fully clothed. The file was marked 216 SS, the letters referring to the La Guaira Social Security Hospital, where many of the bodies recovered during the first 24 hours after the twin earthquakes were taken.

She had to examine the images repeatedly before finding 212 SS, the number assigned to Angelina. That file contained a photograph of her face. Liliana says a number had been written in marker near the teenager’s neck, though it was difficult to make out. There was also a full-body photograph. Angelina was naked.

Finding the identification numbers did not bring an end to the ordeal. Accompanied by her sister, Liliana had to search through rows of body bags stacked haphazardly one on top of another, some stored in shipping containers left outdoors by the sea. In one of those metal containers — which, she notes, had no refrigeration during the first few days but have since been fitted with cooling systems — she located the bags bearing the numbers she was looking for.

By then it was night, and she had to use the flashlight on her phone to see. Even there, her ordeal was not over. “In my daughter’s bag labeled 212 SS, there was an elderly woman. In 216 SS, where her father should have been, there was a burned man,” she says, disappointed and shaken by all she has seen.

The numbers were erased

The lack of coordination in the hours immediately following the earthquake has left families like Liliana’s trapped in a kind of mourning limbo. It has also exposed the government’s delayed response. There was not even enough paper and pen to identify the dead properly.

During the first 72 hours, the burden of recovery fell largely on desperate relatives and volunteers searching through piles of concrete rubble with their bare hands. On the morning after the disaster, police pickup trucks crisscrossed the area at high speed, collecting bodies and transporting them to hospitals or the morgue. Some remained for hours under sheets beside collapsed buildings.

A growing number of cases resemble Liliana’s. They do not appear among the missing — figures the government has chosen not to disclose — because there is evidence that they have died. “When I saw that the people in the bags were not mine, the morgue staff told me that this was happening,” says Liliana.

Some families recovered the bodies of loved ones and attached a face mask to an ankle, writing the deceased’s name and ID number on it. Even those bodies have subsequently gone missing.

But Angelina’s mother has not stopped demanding explanations. “They told me that because it rained the day after the earthquake, some numbers were washed away and bodies got mixed up,” she says. “They also told me to forget that number, because the numbering system has changed, that I should have patience, and I don’t know how much more I should have. We all deserve closure to this tragedy.”

While she waits for answers, she has tried to begin the grieving process. One day she took flowers to the sea for her daughter. She says she still sends messages to Angelina’s phone, even though nobody answers anymore.

At La Esperanza Cemetery, half an hour from La Guaira, there are two graves marked with Angelina’s and Richard’s identification numbers. The day after the earthquake, bulldozers began digging trenches in a mountainside near the town of Carayaca to create individual graves for bodies whose identities had not been definitively established. According to figures acknowledged by authorities on Saturday, some 315 people have been buried there. Funerals have also been held for those who have been formally identified.

During the cemetery’s first days of operation, a heavy police presence restricted access, preventing some relatives from attending farewells. This occurred just as journalists began reporting on conditions at the cemetery designated for earthquake victims. During the first week after the disaster, the government had provided no official information about the site.

In recent days, however, government social-media accounts have attempted to explain the process. “The silos were considered by our authorities to be the most suitable location, and I agree with that decision. The area is spacious, it’s far from residential zones, and the bodies are already in an advanced state of decomposition because the heat in La Guaira makes preservation difficult,” said Sihune Villalobos, deputy director of the forensic service, in a video posted by the Ministry of Communication on Instagram.

The official added that bodies that cannot be processed during a given day are stored in bags designed to maintain a stable temperature. In another video, an evangelical pastor explains that the cemetery has a tent where funeral services and religious ceremonies can be held.

DNA and dental identification

The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) warned last week that recovering and identifying the victims is one of the most complex aspects of the emergency response. Under international disaster protocols, each body must be “recovered, georeferenced, identified, documented, and subjected to genetic testing before final disposition,” explained PAHO’s Director of Emergencies, Ciro Ugarte.

Yet a lack of clear information about the procedures for locating and identifying the dead has been a recurring problem, as has the absence of reliable data on the missing. Families are left to return again and again, searching through photographs and body bags in the hope of finding their loved ones. Official daily reports do not break down fatalities by sex, do not specify how many victims are children, and do not classify the dead according to the areas where they lost their lives.

The government maintains that every body transferred to La Esperanza Cemetery has a case file and has undergone the necessary forensic procedures to allow for future identification. The bodies associated with graves 212 and 216, which Liliana is still searching for, are not available, however. Authorities have also refused her request for an exhumation.

Liliana has attended dental-identification interviews relating to her daughter, who wore braces, a detail that could help confirm her identity. Every day, she travels to the port silos hoping for answers. Last week, she went to the morgue in Caracas to provide a blood sample for DNA testing, which could establish a genetic match with some of the unidentified bodies. The situation is especially painful because the bodies she is looking for had already been identified, photographed and assigned numbers.

After nearly three weeks of fruitless searching, a new uncertainty has deepened her anguish. “I’ve asked them many times whether it’s possible that another family took Angelina’s or Richard’s body and cremated or buried them believing they were their own,” she says.

The possibility has become a haunting suspicion: “They always tell me that is impossible, but in the hours I was there I saw many people taking body bags without opening them to check who was inside.”

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