LA GUAIRA, Venezuela — The apartments that stood here once signaled a new beginning, part of the emblematic “grand housing mission” that delivered government-built apartments to thousands of families after the socialist revolution of President Hugo Chávez.
Many who benefited from the program had been displaced by natural disasters, including Venezuela’s worst — flash floods and landslides that killed tens of thousands of people in this coastal state in 1999. Here in the Caraballeda neighborhood, hundreds of families moved into this complex of four 12-story apartment buildings that offered what the government called a “dignified” home.
Now, the homes have been reduced to a mountain of cement and rubble. The earthquakes that struck Venezuela back-to-back Wednesday evening leveled three of the four buildings, destroying at least 960 apartments and burying an unknown and unimaginable number of people.
A fetid stench, thick with dust and smoke, lingered in the air. On the ground lay several charred bodies, their skin blackened and peeling. A corpse, crushed between two concrete slabs, hung from one of the buildings, the torso, arms and face swollen and burnt.
Daylenys Rodriguez, 26, held her head and wailed. “My daughters,” she keened, to no one in particular. They were 3 and 7.
“I know they’re in there,” she moaned. “Those are the walls of my house.”
At least 920 people are confirmed dead and 3,360 injured in the 7.2-magnitude and 7.5-magnitude earthquakes centered some 100 miles west of Caracas, Venezuelan officials said Friday. More than 3,000 were displaced and at least 172 remained trapped in collapsed buildings.
Rescue teams had begun arriving from the United States and countries around the world, but for many here, they still seemed far away. For more than two days, the rescue effort at the housing mission in the Caraballeda neighborhood has been led by local emergency responders, volunteers and neighbors without the heavy machinery needed to tear into the ruins.
Blazes erupted amid the wreckage, but no firefighters arrived to extinguish them; most of the fire trucks in La Guaira were inoperable before the earthquakes.
The deepest economic collapse documented outside wartime — the result of mismanagement by the socialist government exacerbated by U.S.-imposed economic sanctions — has left the country ill-equipped to respond.
The sector that contracted the most during the years-long crisis, the Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodriguez said, was construction.
Interim president Delcy Rodriguez, nominally heading the government since the U.S. military seized President Nicolás Maduro in January, has asked the private sector to provide construction machinery.
“That is actually the sector that could provide you with the capacity to react, and it’s the sector that completely imploded over the past decade,” Francisco Rodriguez said.
But government lapses were evident long before the worst of the economic crisis, when the country was rebuilding after the 1999 floods.
That catastrophe struck during the first year of Chávez’s presidency, the dawn of Venezuela’s socialist state. The government launched studies and updated laws and construction codes to prepare for the next natural disaster, said Alejandro Linayo, a systems engineer and earthquake risk-reduction specialist who worked for the Chávez government.
But those laws and codes were only loosely followed and enforced, Linayo said.
Chávez ordered the housing mission ahead of Venezuela’s 2012 elections. The project continued after his death in 2013.
In the rush, many of the buildings were constructed hastily, according to Augusto Rivera, an architect and professor at Venezuela’s Central University who has studied the housing mission program. Some lacked proper geotechnical investigations; others had poor ventilation or lighting.
“They had to meet a political deadline rather than build housing that offered all the benefits a home deserves,” Rivera said.
“They were certainly speeding to try to have these things ready,” Rodriguez said. “It’s not surprising to me that they would have cut a lot of corners when doing so.”
Kimberlyng Leon, 39, lived in a 10th-floor apartment since the building opened. She had put in her request and gone to political rallies for the government. In 2014, she got the call.
Leon was assured the building was earthquake-proof. When she arrived, it was still under construction. Lightbulbs and power plugs were missing; water leaked. But she stayed. “It was bad quality,” she said. “But it was my place.”
The government said it built more than 4 million houses as part of the Grand Housing Mission. Rodriguez said the claim was impossible; construction gross domestic product declined by 91 percent.
“The buildings they built were not able to resist a disaster of this magnitude,” Rodriguez said. “Their construction was just as unsustainable as a lot of what they did.”
Family members and neighbors dug bare-handed through the rubble throughout Thursday. A pickup truck with masked police officers in tactical gear drove slowly through the area Thursday night. Helped by a nurse and others, they piled bodies into the pickup’s payload. It was the only official presence in sight.
Daiver Campos, 23, was away on vacation with his girlfriend when the earthquakes struck. He rushed home and spent hours digging and shouting the names of his family members.
He learned his father, mother and sister were all out when the building collapsed. But two younger brothers, ages 8 and 3, were home. By Thursday evening he still had not found them.
He pulled out neighbor after neighbor.
“You could hear the screams from below,” he said. “Two kids died in my arms as I was trying to get them out.”
Others were killed when gas canisters and cars caught on fire.
An excavator, the first heavy machinery to arrive at the site, appeared around 4 p.m. Friday, almost 48 hours after the quakes.
Four women leaned against the last building on the street still standing, a one-story school now used as a morgue.
Auroma Alamo, 18, sobbed. Her mother lay in the wreckage. They had planned for years to move out of their leaky apartment. “It is like we were an experiment by the government,” Alamo said.
Leon’s daughter survived. She was staying on the top floor of the building with her boyfriend. As the quake hit, they hugged, jumped into bed and closed their eyes. They could feel each floor collapsing underneath them.
But her two young boys were still inside. She planned to stay until she found them.
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