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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Francisco Pérez, wearing a hard hat and carrying a flashlight, has spent the past week outside the parking garage of a building that no longer exists. Somewhere beneath the rubble, several meters underground, is the car belonging to the woman he treats as his mother — his boss, Nancy Rojas, 67. He believes she is still inside.

Francisco says he managed to determine roughly where the vehicle might be and shouted questions down to her. According to him, she answered by knocking twice on the roof of the car for “yes” and three times for “no.” Others tried to convince him it could have been any noise. He refused to believe it. One knock, he said, could be a falling stone; three had to be Nancy calling for help.

Day after day, he returned to speak to Nancy, who used to call him “son,” but he has not heard her again. Given the condition of the building, rescuing her now seems impossible. The structure is so unstable that moving a single slab could bring the rest crashing down. Until Monday, he still had hope.

Francisco’s story is one among thousands.

A week after the twin earthquakes plunged Venezuela into yet another unimaginable crisis, Delcy Rodríguez’s government has declared a week of national mourning, with the official death toll standing at 2,295 and the number of injured at 11,267. On Tuesday, however, National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez suggested that the number of fatalities could be as high as 10,000. More body bags are on the way.

Meanwhile, a platform run by supporters of opposition leader María Corina Machado — an unofficial channel that often duplicates cases already reported elsewhere — says 40,668 people are “out of contact” with relatives. Authorities report damage to 855 buildings, 189 of which have totally collapsed. They are just numbers in a country that will spend months counting and burying its dead.

Francisco has felt so powerless that for days he told anyone willing to listen that the woman trapped beneath the rubble was his mother, even though she was not.

“It was the only way to get anyone to pay attention,” he confesses. “People, when I said she was my mom and they saw how desperate I was, came to help… That’s why the lie went so far.”

Seven days after the earthquakes, Francisco no longer talks about rescuing his boss. He talks about recovering her body. And burying it with dignity.

The vigil kept by the 28-year-old and his friend Scarly Rojas, Nancy’s only daughter, has become part of a ritual repeated day and night across La Guaira.

In the early hours of the morning, when there is less traffic and machinery noise, dozens of damaged buildings fall silent while rescuers — sometimes professionals, sometimes simply neighbors — call for quiet in hopes of hearing voices or knocks from beneath the debris. It is the same code Francisco used, repeated across an entire city.

Makeshift camps dot the area. Mattresses line the entrances of shattered residential complexes. People sleep there every night despite the overwhelming stench of decomposing bodies that now hangs over much of the municipality. And as long as that routine continues — as long as every night still carries even the faintest possibility of hearing something — it is difficult for an entire city to accept whatever comes next after the catastrophe.

On Tuesday, Scarly approached someone wearing a shirt emblazoned with the word “psychologist.” “I spoke to him because I also happen to be a psychiatric patient,” she explains. “I suffer from anxiety, and throughout all of this I’m still in shock. I haven’t really been able to process it or cry.”

Francisco remains stunned as well. He barely reacts and shows little emotion, but he is beginning to come to terms with reality. “Right now what’s left for me is to recover the body, give it a burial and go on with my life,” he says.

Outside another collapsed building, he stands with two young men whose girlfriends — sisters — remain buried beneath the rubble. Together they describe the wall preventing them from moving forward: they simply want to bury their dead.

“The hardest thing is that two days ago I had to do grocery shopping and it hit me hard,” Francisco tells them. “I kept thinking: ‘Damn, I’m doing something from ordinary life while my mom [referring to Nancy] is down there.’ And I can’t.”

Andrés Piñero, whose Spanish girlfriend Franchesca is one of the women still trapped inside, nods. “That’s what we want. To bury her, at least.”

Even for families who have already recovered a loved one’s body, grief is obstructed by countless hurdles: moving from one morgue to another — some of them improvised in open-air spaces — trying to find the deceased, identify them, fill out paperwork, and arrange cremation.

Hundreds of bodies have spent days exposed to the Caribbean heat — in parking lots, vacant lots and at the port.

“Some are already unrecognizable,” says a member of Delcy Rodríguez’s government in the disaster zone.

When possible, identification is carried out through personal belongings, tattoos or dental records. When it is not, families find themselves trapped in a different kind of limbo than Francisco’s: they have a body, but no certainty that it belongs to their loved one. Given the scale of the death toll, cremations cannot wait.

The desperation to reach relatives has driven some people to bypass the authorities, who are slow to arrive. José Mesa’s daughter and her grandparents remain trapped beneath the rubble of a building that leans a little farther each day. This week he climbed onto the roof himself, hoping to pull them out with his bare hands.

“It was a bit difficult because we didn’t have the materials. We need someone to climb up and help us,” he says.

But seven days after the earthquake, rescue teams remain focused on a different priority: the living, not the dead. Like Francisco, Mesa is waiting his turn.

Members of international rescue teams deployed to Venezuela say that sense of helplessness has produced a phenomenon increasingly visible on social media: survivors crawling into rubble and filming themselves pretending to be trapped, hoping the videos will go viral and draw rescuers to the exact building where their loved ones remain buried. They lie so that someone will come to help.

In Venezuela — a country where even in ordinary times many people live day to day — almost nobody is talking about the future yet.

“Maybe one day you recover,” Francisco says, “but for months afterward you’ll walk into a hardware store, see a pickaxe or a shovel, and it’ll all come back to you.”

For now, neither he nor anyone else can afford to think that far ahead. There is still searching to do.

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Dr. Romero remembers that the woman arrived “walking like a little penguin and dripping.” She had just given birth on her own and still had pieces of the placenta inside her. Two nurses rushed her into surgery, and an operation began to prevent her from bleeding to death.

Using a cannula, Dr. Romero carefully removed the remaining tissue and, in less than an hour, extracted it all with precision Kocher forceps.

It was not the first time Romero had performed such a procedure, but it was the first time he had done so in temperatures above 40°C (104°F), in the dark, illuminated only by the nurses’ cellphones, and while operating on a McDonald’s stool.

The fast-food restaurant has been turned into a field hospital amid the devastation in La Guaira, at the epicenter of Venezuela’s earthquake disaster. The makeshift facility, set up by volunteer doctors and supplied through donations from civil society, has become a symbol of the extreme needs, institutional abandonment and improvised response that persist a week after the worst natural disaster to strike Venezuela in more than a century.

The window of hope for finding survivors beneath the rubble is growing ever narrower, but the toll of the disaster continues to rise. One week on, the death toll has surpassed 1,900, with more than 10,000 people injured. According to the Venezuelan government, which issues brief daily updates with few details, 855 buildings have been affected, of which 189 have suffered a total collapse.

Jorge Rodríguez, the president of the National Assembly and the official leading the government’s sparse daily briefings, announced on Tuesday that 50 camps have been set up on the outskirts of the capital to shelter survivors. Authorities have also improvised eight new morgues, where bodies are piling up.

At the port of La Guaira, hundreds of bodies await identification by relatives, who queue for hours in lines stretching for blocks. While waiting to enter the port facilities, many rummage through mountains of clothing piled up in the street, searching for possessions recovered from the disaster.

The coastal state has borne the brunt of the disaster, with tourist towers more than 10 stories high reduced to mountains of rubble and countless victims buried beneath them. But there are also poorer neighborhoods where little, if any, aid has arrived.

The U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said on Tuesday that there has been a “dramatic surge in humanitarian and protection needs” in the hardest-hit areas, citing severe food shortages, the collapse of basic services and growing protection risks for displaced people.

In the face of the government’s inadequate response, a final-year medical student from Caracas who arrived in the disaster zone during the first days set up a makeshift clinic “with a blanket and two tarps tied to a tree” near the McDonald’s abandoned after the earthquake.

One of his first patients was a police officer suffering from low blood pressure.

“We stabilized him and I took the opportunity to ask him to let us use the restaurant so we could work in better conditions,” he says outside the building, which is cordoned off with yellow police tape.

The arrangement was that the doctors would be allowed inside while police officers would provide security against theft and looting, which have become increasingly common in the hardest-hit areas.

They gained access on Saturday and, the following day, after clearing away debris, converted the building into a functioning medical facility. The operating room — where they treated the woman who had just given birth — was installed in the first-floor dining area. The pharmacy was set up beside the counter where hamburgers were once served. Upstairs became a rest area, filled with worn mattresses where doctors and nurses can sleep.

Relations with the police have not always been easy. The student, who serves as a liaison with the officers, says he trusts “only the commanders.”

“The rank-and-file officers try to take advantage of the tragedy,” he says.

In the dining area, doctors have hung IV bags and vitamin drips from the ceiling using bandages. With an IV line in his right arm, Officer Nelson Guerrero, a heavyset 52-year-old, explains that he asked medical staff to administer insulin because he has only one kidney following a traffic accident.

“We’re here to stop people from taking advantage, to make sure nobody does what they shouldn’t,” he says, as the drip delivers insulin and sweat runs down his forehead.

Tension

Inside the McDonald’s-turned-hospital, the atmosphere is even more tense than usual. The medical team has just been warned that the building next door — a massive pastel-colored apartment block with more than 100 units that is still standing — is on the verge of completely collapsing.

It is one of the public housing projects built by the Chávez government under the Misión Vivienda housing program for low-income families. Residents recall that when former president Hugo Chávez came to inaugurate the complex more than two decades ago, he invoked a famous line from his political hero. During reconstruction efforts after the devastating 1812 earthquake that struck Caracas, Simón Bolívar declared: “If nature opposes us, we will fight against it and make it obey us.” Chávez repeated the same messianic rallying cry after the deadly mudslides that devastated this very region in 1999, the first major disaster his movement faced after coming to power.

“It seems we’re cursed,” says one resident, his face covered with a T-shirt to shield himself from the sun and the stench of decay.

The government of Delcy Rodríguez, which has been under U.S. supervision since president Nicolás Maduro’s capture in January, is also facing its first major test. Public frustration, already stretched to the limit, is growing by the day. With thousands of armed soldiers and police officers deployed across the disaster zone, the risk of social unrest is a latent threat with unpredictable consequences.

“We have had no news from the government. They certainly aren’t supporting us here,” says Dr. Miguel Romero, the surgeon leading the field hospital, although responsibility for directing operations rotates among the medical teams when they head out into the field.

Romero, 34, is pursuing a doctorate in neurology in Germany. He arrived in Venezuela one day before the earthquake to visit family in Coro, a coastal city. Since reaching the disaster zone after a bus journey of more than 10 hours, he has slept only a couple of hours a day.

The McDonald’s pharmacy is well stocked, the doctors say. It has intravenous painkillers, surgical supplies, anti-anxiety medications and even veterinary drugs, used to treat pets in the parking lot, where until a few days ago customers drove through to pick up their Big Macs.

Upstairs, the restaurant is also housing international rescue teams with nowhere else to spend the night. More than 2,300 specialists have arrived from countries including Mexico, China, Spain and Qatar.

Monday night was particularly difficult. It rained in La Guaira for the first time since the disaster, something many had expected given that it is the rainy season. The sky had been forgiving until then. Rain and mud have made everything even harder.

But Dr. Ramírez, who is close to completing his studies in Germany, remains hopeful: “I trust in the strength, resilience and stoicism of a people mobilized and clinging to life.”

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