Friday, June 26, 2026 - Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, has vowed to fight to save “as many people as possible” as the official death toll from the country’s worst earthquake in more than a century almost doubled, but frustration was growing at the perceived sluggishness of the government’s response.
Rodríguez’s brother, Jorge, the president of the national
assembly, said on Friday that the official number of dead had risen to 920.
Delcy Rodríguez had earlier said almost 3,000 people were injured. Speaking
during a tour of La Guaira, the most devastated region, she said foreign
search and rescue groups were starting to arrive.
“We offer our solidarity [to families of victims],” Rodríguez
said late on Thursday outside the ruins of an eight-floor seafront hotel
that had been obliterated by twin 7.2- and 7.5-magnitude quakes.
United Nations aid chief Tom Fletcher told the AFP news
agency that more than 50,000 people were missing after two powerful earthquakes
struck within a minute of each other on Wednesday evening, flattening buildings
in the north of the country.
Volunteer searchers and the relatives of the many missing
voiced exasperation and anger at the lack
of an official response as they waited for government teams
Rotny Bombart, a 33-year-old paramedic, said he had spent
five hours hunting for his mother, María Eugenia, in a collapsed tower block in
La Guaira called OPP 33. “It has 15 floors. Or rather, it used to, because
there’s nothing left of it now,” Bombart said after being treated at a public
hospital in the capital, Caracas, for a gash to his right arm sustained during
the search.
Bombart said that at first no government emergency workers
had appeared at the scene. In their absence, desperate local people seized the
initiative, picking their way through the rubble with bare hands and basic
tools. “You’re prepared for emergencies, but not for this. Nothing prepares you
for this,” he said, recalling seeing dismembered bodies, dead people and
children in the wreckage.
Another searcher, Diego González, said he had spent hours
digging his 34-year-old cousin, Helari Rodríguez, out of the debris of
Residencias Belo Horizonte, an apartment building in the seaside town of Catia
La Mar.
“It took us four hours to pull her out of the rubble with
the help of some friends,” he said. “People are working with their bare hands.
Tools are essential. But Catia La Mar is destroyed – very few buildings will
have survived.”
Foreign nationals have been confirmed among the dead,
reportedly including 15 of Portuguese nationality or descent, seven Chinese,
two Brazilians, five Spaniards and an Italian Venezuelan.
A British search and rescue team has been deployed to Venezuela made up of personnel from fire brigades across the country.
The 68-strong team left RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire
along with six search dogs and humanitarian staff.
Britain has also dispatched members of the UK Emergency
Medical Team to prepare for a further medical deployment and made £2m ($2.6m)
of humanitarian funding available to help respond to the disaster.
King Charles and Queen Camilla said they were “deeply
saddened” by the earthquakes. In a personal message on Friday night, Charles
said: “To the people of Venezuela. My wife and I were deeply saddened to learn
of the devastating earthquakes that have struck your country, and of the tragic
loss of life and suffering they have caused.
“At this most difficult of times, we send our profound
sympathy to all those who have lost loved ones, homes and livelihoods. Our
special thoughts are with the injured, those awaiting news of family and
friends, and the emergency responders working tirelessly to support those in
desperate need.
“We greatly admire the resilience and strength of the
Venezuelan people and send our most heartfelt condolences to all those affected
by this terrible tragedy.”
On Thursday, the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, said
that on Donald Trump’s orders he had mobilised troops to “support the
Venezuelan people” in their hour of need. “Our mission is clear: save lives and
rapidly deliver critical aid where it is most needed,” he tweeted.
The US was sending a disaster response team of more than 250 personnel, including three special search-and-rescue units with dogs trained to locate people trapped beneath the rubble.
US Southern Command said Marine Corps Maj Gen Kevin J
Jarrard had landed in Caracas to oversee the use of “the US military’s
unparalleled logistical and operational capabilities” to help with the search.
Other countries including Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, Spain, France,
Turkey and Switzerland have offered to send humanitarian aid and rescue teams.
Thirty-six hours after the back-to-back earthquakes
devastated Venezuela’s northern coast, there was scant sign of government help
reaching many areas, exposing how years of economic misrule and corruption have
left authorities woefully unprepared for a disaster on this scale.
Chaotic footage from the José María Vargas hospital in La
Guaira captured the extent to which Venezuela’s public health system had
withered as Rodríguez’s predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, led the country into
economic freefall. Patients could be seen lying on the floor as they waited for
treatment in the facility’s car park.
Orlando Pérez, a Latin America expert at the University of
North Texas at Dallas, said: “It seems they weren’t prepared at all. Natural
disasters reveal the true capabilities of a government because you have to
respond quickly, you have to respond efficiently, you have to do search and
rescue, you have to provide services in situations where it’s difficult. And it
seems that the government has been caught flat-footed completely.
“It’s incredible because this is a resource-rich country,”
Pérez added. Venezuela boasts the world’s largest proven reserves of oil but
under Maduro was plunged into one of the worst peacetime economic crises in
modern history.
“Yet you have completely degraded health infrastructure,
buildings that were not built to code that collapsed very easily,” Pérez said.
“They have had the resources but they have squandered it. The health
infrastructure in particular is very weak. Hospitals lack equipment, they lack
medicine – and that is going to cost lives.”
An opposition activist, Jesús Armas, said successive Chavista administrations had failed to invest sufficiently in the emergency and healthcare services that would have enabled them to better cope with a disaster they should have anticipated, given Venezuela’s location along the boundary between the Caribbean and South American tectonic plates. “Every 50 or 70 years we have a [major] earthquake … We should have been prepared,” he said.
“Yesterday we saw people working in these
[destroyed] places – people
from civil protection and the police and national guard – without gloves, without helmets
and without any kind of tools … So we need all the international support possible.”
Compounding the problem was Venezuela’s severe migration crisis, in
which nearly 8 million citizens had fled abroad to escape economic crisis and
political repression. “A lot
of doctors, a lot of engineers that we need right now, a lot of experts in
civil protection and rescue operations [have all left] ... This is a tragedy.”
Writing on X, Juan Pablo Guanipa, a prominent opposition
politician, questioned why Venezuela’s armed forces were not doing more to help
civilian victims. “So far we have not seen real mobilisation or action [from the military] in the
face of this grave situation that we are facing. We have seen families,
neighbours and rescue workers trying to save lives with their own hands,”
Guanipa said. “Right now, all of us need to be involved, the armed forces
included.”
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