He had hacked apart concrete and sawed through rebar and pressed on through heat and dust and exhaustion, persevering as men far bigger and stronger collapsed.
Now, on Day 25 of his search, Winder Delfín, age 17, had finally found what he was looking for. Deep in the tunnel he had dug with his brother Deivi, age 15, his father and his stepfather, Winder could make out the flower-print dress that belonged to his grandmother.
He hoped his mother and little brother were just beyond.
“There are bodies nearby,” he said, looking up at his father from the edge of the tunnel.
A month after a pair of history-making earthquakes ripped across Venezuela, the country’s hardest-hit state, La Guaira, remains a scene of grueling, painstaking searches for the dead. From dawn until far past dusk, thousands of survivors fan out across the remains of the residences that once stood just blocks from the beach, climbing onto the mountains of rubble with pickaxes and sledgehammers, fueled by an obsessive desire to recover the bodies of the people they loved.
Officially the death toll is 5,208, but the government has said it could be as high as 10,000.
The hands of the searchers bleed. Dust coats their lungs and reddens their eyes. At night, some sleep atop the debris, too tired to go anywhere else. They live on donated sandwiches and plastic thimbles of coffee and the hope that they can somehow heal through their efforts, that those taken so suddenly can rest once they are found.
The smallest are children or adolescents whose parents don’t have the strength to keep them away, or who have lost their parents altogether. Survivors call them moles because they can tunnel into tiny spaces, lighting the way with cellphones and headlamps and reporting back to the adults above.
In another place, this work might be done by professionals. But the Venezuelan state, its capacities debilitated by years of mismanagement, corruption and U.S. sanctions, has left the job of recovering bodies largely to civilian survivors and volunteers.
In La Guaira, soldiers are most visible marching back and forth along the streets, sometimes sweeping dust from the roads and lining up for food brought in by foreign aid groups.
Winder and his brother Deivi lived with their grandmother Carmen, 69, mother, Yusmani, 35, and brother Moissés, 10, in an apartment on the first floor of a 12-story public housing building. Yusmani had just begun a new job at nearby beach club, a vacation spot for wealthier Venezuelans.
On June 24, the day the quakes struck, the older boys had gone to play at a water park. On the way home, they said, the earth began to shake and they hugged each other and closed their eyes. When they opened them, their building was gone.
They spent that evening rescuing survivors, and have been digging through the rubble ever since. Their father, Deivid Delfín, 44, a barber, had been with their mother for 14 years. Their stepfather, Giovanni Berroterán, 50, had been with her for four. Now, the men were working together to find the woman they had both loved.
Mr. Delfín said that he knew the work was dangerous for his sons but that he did not know how to keep them away. He felt lost, he said, when they cried and ask him to explain what happened.
“I’m no longer a boy,” Deivi said one day.
It took them three weeks to hammer and drill through the 12 stories that had pancaked one on top of the other.
The boys, their fathers and two uncles had dug three different holes trying to locate Apartment 107. Their tools: a shovel, pickax, sledgehammer, jackhammer, saw, even a kitchen knife, all shared between neighbors.
With no women from the family around, the men often stopped to hug one another.
On Day 23, the adults critiqued Deivi’s use of the sledgehammer, telling him to swing lower to save his energy. Winder, slight for 17, wore a pair of child’s jeans, the words “Too Strong 4 You” etched on the fabric. His yellow work gloves, several sizes too big, made him look like Mickey Mouse.
On Day 24, Deivi opened a fourth hole and arrived at the living room. By evening, they were pulling out a pair of shorts belonging to Moissés, and a small white undershirt. Mr. Delfín, sitting at the edge of the hole in the twilight, held it to his cheek and cried.
On Day 25, a group of Christian volunteers arrived from the nearby city of Valencia, wearing shirts that said “love for your neighbor.”
Carlos Lizarraga, one of the volunteers, signaled toward the boys’ two fathers. “It happened to him,” he said, “but it could happen to me.”
Soldiers marched by with their brooms. A volunteer psychologist, Obtavio Guerra, stood at the edge of the collapsed building. He had counseled some 50 survivors in recent days, he explained.
“The emotional reality hasn’t surfaced yet,” he said, calling the search for the bodies a way for people to stay occupied, distracted. “It is lying dormant, like a wave that could arrive at any moment.”
From the hole that led to the boys’ living room someone pulled out their mother’s Bible. It was wet and twisted but intact, and Deivi opened it to the last pages, where she had made lists of favorite verses and ills she must have wanted to expel.
On one page she had started a grocery list: two plantains, two lemons. Out came another of her books, “What Young People Ask: Practical Answers.”
It was noon when they found the first body and Winder, lying on his belly in the hole, recognized his grandmother’s flower-print dress. For hours they tried to widen the tunnel so they could extract her. The men hacked at the concrete with hammers and picks; the boys hauled the chopped pieces out.
Above them, an excavator clawed at the side of the building.
The family pleaded with the operator not to disturb their work — they wanted to pull out the bodies themselves.
Finally, two volunteers put on white plastic suits, blue gloves and masks. Just one had a helmet. They descended into the hole, crawled into the tunnel, and placed Carmen’s body in a black bag.
More volunteers carried the bag down the mountain of rubble. The family huddled together. The boys stood in the crooks of their father’s arms and cried as one of the Christian rescuers said a prayer.
“Tomorrow we’ll be back,” said Mr. Lizarraga, “because there are two more bodies.”
A police truck pulled up and officers laid Carmen’s body in its bed. Their father and stepfather climbed in, too, headed off to identify the body.
It took another 24 hours to locate Yusmani and Moissés, who had been in the kitchen. Mr. Delfín fainted before they were pulled out and had to step aside. But Winder kept working late into the night, unfurling a body bag for his mother and freeing her from the place she had died.
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