A faint voice, possibly that of an 80-year-old woman, was heard somewhere beneath the rubble of a collapsed apartment block in Tanaguarenas last weekend — and it may be the only thing keeping her family from despair.
Daniela Mangiafico has heard nothing certain of her grandmother, Josefa Báez Verdejo, since the building where they both lived came down during last Wednesday’s twin earthquakes along Venezuela’s northern coast. “My entire life is gone: everything, my grandmother and my pets; all of them are my family,” she said on Sunday. Two days later, a faint sound raised cautious hope that Josefa might have found shelter in a space behind her bed. But the machinery needed to reach her has not arrived. “There’s tonnes and tonnes of rubble that we cannot lift with our hands,” her sister Jennifer said in a video posted on Tuesday morning.
The Mangiafico family’s ordeal is one thread in a catastrophe whose true dimensions are only now beginning to emerge — and they appear considerably more severe than Venezuelan authorities have acknowledged.
The back-to-back earthquakes, measuring magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, struck on 19 March, killing at least 1,943 people, injuring more than 10,571, and leaving tens of thousands unaccounted for. The UN migration agency estimates that up to 6.8 million people could be affected and will require shelter, clean water, sanitation, healthcare, and emergency relief. Against that backdrop, the government’s official damage count — 855 buildings affected, including 189 total collapses, according to Jorge Rodríguez, president of the National Assembly — has attracted considerable scepticism.
That scepticism now has empirical support. Researchers at Oregon State University, working from high-resolution radar imagery gathered the day after the quakes by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellites, concluded that “approximately 58,870 buildings were likely damaged or destroyed across the affected region.” The findings were published through NASA and carry the caveat that this constitutes “a preliminary, rapid assessment” reflecting “abrupt surface change consistent with damage.” Even so, the order-of-magnitude gap between the satellite estimate and the official figure is striking.
On the ground, the numbers find an uncomfortable echo. Nicolás Serrato, a volunteer rescuer who travelled from southern Venezuela to assist in and around La Guaira, described a landscape of near-universal structural failure. “Very few buildings are unaffected,” he said. “The vast majority of homes, from small houses to three-storey buildings and huge apartment blocks, are all badly damaged. And those still standing have serious structural problems.” Serrato said the satellite estimate of roughly 50,000 damaged structures matched what he had witnessed with his own eyes. “It’s truly brutal,” he added. “All those people who survived are now searching for their families.”
The port city of La Guaira has become the epicentre of both the physical destruction and the humanitarian response. The government has militarised the area and introduced a permit requirement for entry into the disaster zone. The United States military has repaired and reopened the city’s port, where at least one warehouse has been converted into a makeshift morgue for hundreds of unidentified bodies. According to Gianluca Rampolla, the UN’s coordinator in Venezuela, 27 countries have mobilised nearly 40 search and rescue teams, comprising more than 2,000 personnel and over 160 dogs. The UN has pre-positioned 10,000 body bags, though officials express hope the final death toll will fall short of requiring them all.
Public health authorities are watching the situation with mounting concern. The World Health Organization has warned of potential disease outbreaks as Venezuela’s already-strained health infrastructure buckles under the additional pressure. “The health services are under extreme pressure now, with facilities operating beyond capacity,” WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier told reporters in Geneva. Pre-existing gaps in vaccination coverage have elevated the risk of measles and diphtheria, while the disruption to sanitation and standing water create conditions conducive to yellow fever, malaria, dengue, chikungunya, and Zika. In La Guaira specifically, the WHO identified gaps in obstetric care after maternity workers went missing in the quakes, alongside what it described as “chaotic service delivery and patient flow, marked by overcrowding and growing surgical backlogs.”
The delay in the official response has generated visible public anger. Rescue teams have arrived, survivors and volunteers acknowledge, but heavy machinery — the kind needed to shift the tonnage of concrete burying people like Josefa Báez Verdejo — has been slow to materialise. “What happened is that help arrived late,” Daniela Mangiafico said plainly. “It’s taking too long and, obviously, how can you ask people who are trapped there to wait?” As hopes of finding survivors alive continue to narrow with each passing day, that question grows harder to answer — and harder still to ignore.