Crushed beneath the rubble, her face covered in dirt, Cristina Margarita Ramos displayed the same good humor she had faced life with. “I’m sorry, sir, but I have this blotch on my face,” she told one of the firefighters trying to pull her from the walls of her home after the June 24 earthquakes. “What you are is beautiful, and I love those nails,” the rescuer replied. Jokes about the compliment spread during the rescue amid such unusual circumstances. “We’ll get you out, ma’am. Trust us,” the firefighter added. The first thing Cristina, 71, managed to free was a hand with long, perfectly manicured nails. A retiree, karaoke enthusiast, seamstress, and mother of two migrant children in the United States who followed her rescue from afar in desperation and are now searching for her body, the family confirmed she died after being taken to a hospital.

It took 20 hours to pull her from the rubble of her home in Playa Grande, during which Cristina became known as “the woman with the pretty nails.” The exchange with her rescuer went viral in the hours after the disaster, among hundreds of videos showing the devastation. That day they first pulled out her husband, Jesús Enrique Magallanes, with Cristina’s help. She was lucid, spoke clearly and kept saying she was strong despite her age, her kidney disease, and a carcinoma on her face that had been diagnosed shortly before. The family has footage of Cristina being carried out on a stretcher from the ruined house, put into an ambulance and arriving at La Guaira Naval Hospital — where her husband had also been taken — after which they lost track of her.

After 37 days of uncertainty, a bitter discovery redirected the search that had gone on for weeks in hospitals, shelters, and morgues. Cristina’s siblings identified her in the photo albums of bodies that hundreds of families review daily on tablets at Los Silos in La Guaira — the storage warehouses at Venezuela’s second-largest commercial port that were converted into a forensic depot for the emergency. No familiar faces had appeared in earlier visits. A few days ago they recognized her by the moles on her face, her pretty nails and the clothes she was wearing: overalls, a T-shirt and socks. They reviewed the images to confirm it. Although there is a forensic photographic record, Cristina’s body does not appear.

Cristina’s case is not the only one that reveals the lack of coordination during the early hours of the disaster and the poor handling of bodies; issues that have extended the suffering of many families and violate human rights standards. “My mother and I messaged several times a day. I know every detail of her life: what she was wearing, what she had eaten, how she felt. The first message I sent every day was to her,” says her daughter, Crisnel Mata, 52, by phone; she keeps reposting everyday memories of her mother. In her most recent videos she has called on Attorney General Larry Devoe and the director of the scientific police, Douglas Rico, to explain the disappearance of Cristina’s body. “We have a right to dignify the memory of our relatives. This is no longer just negligence; it is a lack of professionalism and empathy. It is very painful not to know what happened, how she died,” the daughter says, her life paralyzed for more than a month. “These past few days have been like being on a roller coaster that I don’t know how to get off of.”

The NGO Committee of Relatives of Caracazo Victims (Cofavic) has warned about the handling of mass deaths in the disaster. With experience from episodes such as the Caracazo social uprising and the La Guaira landslide, both in 1999, the organization points to a lack of transparency in the current process. The government has not reported numbers of missing people nor has it explained the procedures to follow in these cases, in which bodies have gone missing. A month after the earthquake, they stopped publishing the death toll; this Monday they updated it to 6,125, over 500 additional deaths since the last tally on July 24. The report, which will now be weekly, still does not break down victims by sex or age, has removed the number of people in shelters, and has added the tonnage of rubble collected.

“In this kind of disaster it is very important that there is transparency, that the information is reliable,” says lawyer and human rights defender Liliana Ortega, director of Cofavic. “There is no reliable public information that gives people confidence there are guarantees of technical competence, that the chain of custody of remains is preserved, or that information is respectful, timely, and understandable. It is necessary to develop an exhumation plan with a clear roadmap. The mistakes of the past cannot be repeated.”

Creating a genetic database — with premortem and postmortem data — and an official list of missing persons are key measures the expert warns are urgent. “The burden of identification cannot rest solely on visual recognition and the survivors. The country does not have the capacity to handle this alone; humanitarian aid must therefore include international technical support. A mistaken identification will trigger enormous distrust. This is essential so that the closure of mourning is dignified and reliable. Recovery and identification are not a bureaucratic procedure: they are a human-rights obligation the state must fulfill.”

Alerts about bodies going missing at the morgue are already circulating among families. Among those who go to identify bodies at Los Silos, the recommendation has spread to bring someone who can stay with the body, once found, while administrative procedures are completed.

Ortega insists that extracting bodies from under the rubble must be done by technical teams, not by civilians, as has been the case. The heavy machinery that has entered the collapsed buildings should be guided by forensic anthropologists. Controlled demolitions of structures began last week. The defender says there should be surveyors and geographers documenting on the ground the exact location of each body, with photographs of the clothing and the structure where it was found, so the remains of each victim can be individualized. “The first thing that should not have been done is the immediate cremation of bodies,” she adds.

“Every finding must be recorded with GPS coordinates, maps, photographs before, during and after, an anatomical description, depth, position of the body, associated objects and biological samples,” the organization specifies in a statement warning that international norms for managing corpses in natural disasters must be followed. “This must be treated from a humanitarian perspective: there is case law in the inter-American system and a series of international standards to meet. Because just as we see deep cracks in buildings, they are present in people. Those mourning processes are not easy to close if the truth about what happened is not known,” Ortega adds.

Crisnel and her family are still searching for that truth. “There has to be a reason, an exhumation of the body, a record of transfers from one hospital to another. My mother’s body has to appear. Why so much silence?” the daughter asks, having amplified the family’s desperation on her social networks. Week after week since June 24, she has navigated a maze of misinformation. Authorities at the health center to which rescuers took Cristina denied she had been there. They also denied that her stepfather had been admitted, although he was transferred to another institution to receive dialysis. More than a month after the tragedy, the man is recovering at home with one leg still swollen and without answers about Cristina. “It was hard to tell him the news, but talking with him these days he told me that when they were both under the rubble my mother told him to stay still, that when they got out they would go on vacation to Margarita,” Crisnel says. That is why she says the viral video of the woman with the pretty nails captured her mother’s essence. “That video is my mother.”

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