Seeking closure: Searching for missing after Venezuela earthquakes | Stories About Earthquakes

Seeking closure

Banners now fill walls, lampposts and shops across La Guaira and the capital of Caracas. They carry the faces of the dead.

As the rescue operation continues, families search for their loved ones, hoping they will be among the 6,462 people rescued so far.

But others face the bleak prospect of knowing the dead. Inside the air-conditioned room in the burial chamber in La Guaira, small wooden coffins, containing the remains of people who have been identified and cremated.

Workers say they have lost count of the number of bodies that have passed through the earthquake. It has confused the mind.

“I spent five days without sleep – day and night I was with people, I was in pain,” Santiago Rodriguez, who works at a funeral home, told Al Jazeera.

Every day, Rodriguez sees new families coming to the funeral home, looking for their missing relatives.

But many leave without answers. Some bodies have been buried without names, although photographs have been taken in case they can be identified later.

Fingerprints can no longer be taken: Most bodies are now severely decomposed.

Workers in white overalls were seen throughout the day carrying corpses outside the building to be piled into trucks. Many bodies are being carried to the mass grave in La Esperanza, La Guaira.

Rodriguez fears something similar to what happened in Venezuela in 1999, when the La Guaira mudslide killed about 30,000 people in the region.

The death toll was so great, and the destruction so great, that some of the victims were never found. The same thing should happen this time, Rodriguez said.

A preliminary report by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) estimates that the earthquake created 1.2 million tons of debris across La Guaira. whole blocks of the city were destroyed.

“When they start removing all the waste, the machine will destroy the remains of many bodies,” said Rodriguez.

He also believes that the lack of government support has cost lives.

Although human rights groups have criticized Venezuela’s ruling United Socialist Party for its brutal crackdown on dissent, Rodriguez said he was no longer afraid.

“The adults didn’t even show up,” he said. “We lost some of our family. I lost two of my grandchildren – two of my daughter’s children. What do I have to lose?”