LATEST: “The military and police are only looking for their own”
World News Update:
The following report highlights an important international development currently attracting worldwide attention.
The keys Generated with AI Families from La Guaira denounce that police and military prioritize rescuing their own loved ones after the earthquakes. Many civilians search for their loved ones in the rubble using only shovels and their hands, in the absence of official help. The marking of buildings for demolition and the shortage of machinery make it difficult to rescue any trapped survivors. There are more than 50,000 missing and the medical infrastructure is collapsed, while international rescuers try to help. At the top of a mountain of rubble in La Guaira, more than 30 officials from the anti-drug police forces of the Government of Venezuela are searching tirelessly and with some equipment for the family of one of them, buried like thousands of others. While below, at ground level, about six civilians are trying, only with shovels and with their bare hands, to make a tunnel that will help them reach the area where they believe their loved ones are. In one of the buildings of the Housing Mission, the Government program of the now detained Nicolás Maduro created to allocate houses to people at risk of exclusion, scenes like these were repeated non-stop. People, tired of the inaction of police or military officials, shouted at them to help them, “that they can’t just do something when they want to,” because “all” those who were under the rubble “are Venezuelans, not dogs.” More than 100 hours after the double of earthquakes that shook the central area of the Caribbean country on June 24, the little hope of finding survivors generates greater desperation among those who continue searching. The victims report that the specialized support and machinery available is insufficient to find those trapped alive. Along the entire Central Coast, the area most affected by the earthquakes, it is already possible to see building facades marked with a giant letter “D” in fluorescent color. This It means, as the rescuers at the site explain, that the structure is marked for demolition in the absence of any sign of life. However, in hundreds of collapsed structures, relatives repeat that no help has arrived or that they visited them but they left. They themselves decided to dig with their hands and with sticks, shovels and pickaxes to try to find survivors. Survivors in La Guaira search for personal items among the ruins. REUTERS/Maxwell Briceno This is the case of the Belo Horizonte building, in the Playa Grande neighborhood, where Venezuelan volunteers have managed to locate several bodies, but they have no way to remove them without machinery or specialized equipment. “We had to come to help” Francis Ocando traveled more than 700 kilometers to get from Maracaibo (northwest) to La Guaira, the place with the greatest impact of the earthquake, and start looking for his nephews and the aunt who took care of them. Isabel and Rafael, 18 and 14 years old respectively, were crushed by the nine floors that collapsed on top of the apartments on the first levels of the housing building granted by the State called OPP-26 and which was left in rubble. With difficulty he managed to reach the disaster area and was in charge of telling the boys’ mother – who a year ago went to Spain to treat the cancer she suffers from – that no one had started looking for the side where they presumed her boys were. Francis had to tell her that they did not know if they were alive and that the reality of what was happening in La Guaira “was much harsher than what is seen.” “They put a probe and estimated that there are between 120 and 150 people alive down here (…) and we thought that they were in that search but it turns out that they are only looking for theirs,” denounced Francis. He condemned that the officials only supported the co-workers, while the families removed debris “with their nails.” The lack of support in the search, which many attribute to laziness and others to lack of personnel due to the magnitude of the tragedy, forced Francis’ entire family to travel to La Guaira from different places in Venezuela and even outside of it to help find missing relatives. “One understands that officials are also people, one cries with them when they find one of their own dead, but they have to understand that in a search where there are thousands trapped, begging to be taken out, there are no preferences. We are all people,” he lamented. There are more than 50,000 missing people among the 774 buildings affected, according to the Government in charge of Delcy Rodríguez. The devastation on the coast of La Guaira from a drone view. The earthquakes also impacted some 38 hospitals, several within La Guaira, which prevents medical care from being concentrated in this region. It forces rescuers to carry out transfers of at least half an hour for each survivor they manage to remove from the ruins. Among the streets of La Guaira, where the smell of the sea contrasts with that of the dead, more than 2,000 international rescuers are already working, with 137 dogs, 49 support vehicles and 84.8 tons of equipment, medicines and surgical supplies. But everything still does not seem enough in the face of the precariousness of a country whose tragedy exposed the crisis.
Global Impact:
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Source: This article was originally published by El Español – Home and adapted for our international English-speaking audience.
Read the original article here.