“It has been utter despair.” Eduardo Campos was driving to work with the radio on when the first morning bulletin reported on the Venezuela earthquake disaster. He pulled over onto the shoulder and sent a WhatsApp message that never went through. Since then, this resident of Marín, in the northwestern Spanish region of Galicia, has done the only thing he could from 4,000 miles away: tell his neighbors’ story to anyone who would listen. To acquaintances in the military, to a cousin in Panama, to his son, a doctor living in Florida, and to the local press. He searched survivor lists for names, requested heavy machinery, asked about a satellite antenna to help locate them amid the rubble. And on Sunday he called EL PAÍS: “Help me get them out of there.”

In a forgotten corner of La Guaira, the ground zero of last Wednesday’s double earthquake, a family from Marín remains trapped: Yhosvany Hernández, the coach of the hockey club where Campos’s son plays; his wife, Adela Taberneiro, the club president; and the couple’s two children, Lía, nine, and Ulises, eight. Buried alongside them are the grandparents, Carmen Rosa Fernández and Roger Hernández, who were hosting the family during their visit to the Venezuelan city wedged between the Caribbean and the mountains.

The Hernández Taberneiro family had emigrated to Galicia seven years ago, and this was their first visit back to Venezuela since leaving.

“He had to take the children away so they could have a better education; those were his words,” recalls his sister. They had return tickets for July 16, but they are now four of the 138 Spanish citizens — the family held dual nationality — listed as missing after Venezuela was struck by two earthquakes.

So far, 17 Spaniards have been confirmed dead. Spanish sources in Caracas warn that those figures are little more than a preliminary accounting and are likely to rise significantly. The overall death toll reached 1,450 on Sunday, while tens of thousands of people remain unaccounted for.

The six of them were celebrating their reunion that Wednesday afternoon. It was also the birthday of both the grandfather and the children’s father. They were all gathered around the dining table in the second-floor apartment — a floor that nobody now knows how to locate beneath the rubble. The tower collapsed forward.

Until Sunday, not a single excavator had reached the modest, devastated neighborhood where the grandparents lived. Standing outside the ruined building since Wednesday is Mabel Hernández, Yhosvany’s sister. She sleeps out in the open on a vacant lot where an old stranded boat is rotting. Some residents have laid out mattresses and blankets there so they can keep watch over the mountain of concrete they are trying to dismantle with their bare hands.

It was Mabel who had arranged the family reunion. Eight months earlier, she had brought her parents from Cuba, and the family tried to get together every year on June 23 and 24, the birthdays of her father and her brother.

“In the end it was like a farewell,” she says. Faced with the tragedy, the woman has one consolation. By sheer chance, her son and his wife, who had been at the celebration, survived. They had stepped outside for a cigarette. “The children are here and I don’t want to smoke in front of them,” the wife had said. The building collapsed while they were on the street. They escaped unharmed.

Her desperation over the rescue effort mirrors that of thousands of Venezuelans these days. “I’ve been here since Wednesday and they have done nothing,” says Mabel, who is demanding heavy machinery to break through the cement and reach her loved ones.

Everyone around her feels the same way: powerless and near collapse. Rescue workers, she says, “come looking for life, but when they don’t hear anything they leave.” Beyond the 72-hour mark, which passed on Saturday, the chances of finding survivors diminish dramatically.

A second excavator arrived after the first, but it cannot operate because there is no fuel. “They lent us a machine, but there is no diesel to put in it. How can they tell me there is no diesel in this country for the machine?” she asks. “Venezuela has no resources, despite being a very [oil] rich country.”

The tower where her parents lived was part of a public housing complex that collapsed entirely. Unlike the wealthier residential developments, with their swimming pools and better construction, these buildings were reduced to rubble. It is also the area where the fewest rescue workers and machines are visible, where residents dig through the debris until their hands bleed, working day and night by the light of their cell phones.

Utter helplessness

The sense of helplessness is overwhelming because many already fear it is too late. That only a miracle could save those still trapped. “If they died, it was because of negligence. I’m sure of it,” Mabel says through her tears. “There’s nothing here. Everything is for them, everything is about making money, everything is about being seen on camera and nothing more,” she says of authorities she feels have abandoned them.

Until Saturday, Mabel still allowed herself to believe her family might emerge alive from beneath the rubble. At night, lying in the vacant lot, she would tell herself they were still breathing: “You know when you just feel something? Up until yesterday, I kept saying they were alive. My father is 84, but the children could hold on a little longer.” Today, she weeps and asks only for a hug.

Meanwhile, in Marín, Eduardo struggles with the anguish of distance and the lack of information. He came to know the family through the children. His son and Ulises became friends in their first year of primary school. Both were shy, similar in temperament — “as thick as thieves, inseparable” for the past two years. When Eduardo started a hockey team at the school, Ulises was already playing, and the friendship carried over from the classroom to the rink.

The family had left Venezuela when Lía was two years old and Ulises had not yet turned one. This was the children’s first trip back to the country where they were born. They were “very, very excited,” Eduardo says.

On Friday, amid the confusion and uncertainty, reports emerged suggesting that the family had appeared on a list of survivors and were safe. The relief was short-lived. It turned out to be a mix-up involving a message from another Yhosvany — the coach’s son from a previous marriage, a doctor living in Florida.

He cannot bring himself to talk about it. “Remembering all that, I feel it would not do me any good right now, I’m sorry,” he says from the United States.

Edu, Eduardo’s six-year-old son, still does not know what has happened in Venezuela. On Friday in class, the children had to write the name of their best friend. Edu drew two figures: he wrote the name of another classmate under one, and Ulises under the other. “Honestly, I would almost prefer not to have any hope,” Eduardo laments. “On Saturday I couldn’t find a corner to cry in. I had to leave the house so I wouldn’t do it in front of the boy.”

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