Nuestra Covertura in Spanish
caracas —
A week has passed since deadly twin earthquakes struck Venezuela, but the official death toll remains shockingly low for both Venezuelans and outside observers. Venezuelan authorities said Wednesday that at least 2,295 people have died from the earthquake, an increase of about 300 from the previous day’s update.
A forensic pathologist, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, told CNN he believed the government’s death toll was a gross undercount, “less than a third of the actual death toll.”
The pathologist said her temporary morgue in the earthquake-ravaged port city of La Guaira processes about 400 bodies a day, many of them mangled beyond recognition or in advanced stages of decomposition. With no more space in the refrigerated truck, the body bags are forced to sit outside in the sun, where they quickly decompose.
She’s not alone in her skepticism. Opposition politicians like Maria Colina Machado accused the government of downplaying the level of destruction. Since the government has not yet released official statistics, Venezuelans abroad have established unofficial means to report missing persons.
Many people are still hidden under the rubble of collapsed skyscrapers, and it may be some time before the full extent of the victims is known. CNN has reached out to the Venezuelan government to ask how the count was calculated and an estimate of the number of people believed to be missing in the aftermath of the earthquake.
“La Guaira is beyond words,” said the pathologist. “There are so many cases, so many families. (Earthquakes) hit low-income households the hardest. They are the most affected.”
Many of these families bring in the remains of their loved ones, which they themselves have dug out from the wreckage.
“They are bringing in the dead themselves because civil protection, firefighters and even emergency services cannot keep up with removing bodies,” she said.
Venezuelans dig by hand as rescue efforts slow due to fuel shortage
Initial estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey say tens of thousands of people likely died in the back-to-back earthquakes of magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5. Beyond daily death toll updates, the Venezuelan government has not released its own estimates of the final death toll.
“We are clearly looking at numbers that are higher than what is already being reported,” Gianluca Rampolla del Tindaro, the UN’s coordinator for Venezuela, said at a press conference on Tuesday.
Critics see the official figures as evidence that the Venezuelan government is deliberately undercounting the number of deaths caused by the earthquake. Doubts over the death toll are not without precedent. After massive landslides and flooding in La Guaira in 1999, the government of late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez never released an official death toll.
In an Instagram video from exile on Monday, Machado said authorities were trying to hide information about the scale of the destruction and accused the government of cutting off communications. CNN has reached out to the Venezuelan government for comment.
Human rights group Provea said on Sunday that “official earthquake statistics raise more questions than provide answers.”
“We need zero opacity in our response to this national tragedy,” the NGO added.
But David Smilde, a Tulane University sociologist and Venezuela expert, isn’t convinced that the government would deliberately misrepresent or downplay the numbers when the scale of the tragedy is bringing in so much aid.
“We’re going to need more research and actual investigation and understanding to really know before we speculate that the government is withholding many deaths,” Smilde told CNN. “I’m not entirely sure that the government has a big incentive to reduce the death toll. They could also try to use the death toll to get more foreign aid.”
Mr. Smilde also noted some important differences between the situation in La Guaira today and the 1999 landslide situation. The floods were so intense at the time that some bodies were washed out to sea and found as far away as Curaçao. Others “were just covered over and never dug up. So there was no real list of how many people were missing.”
“When it comes to Venezuela,” Smilde warns, “trying to politicize is very important. Basically everything that happens in Venezuela is used by one side or the other for the purposes of local power. That goes for the government and it goes for the opposition.”
Sociologist Rafael Uzcategui, director of the Laboratorio de Paz think tank, said the Venezuelan government is plagued by inefficiency and political nepotism, making it difficult to provide accurate information.
“The government recognizes that this could delegitimize Delcy Rodriguez in the wake of the tragedy and could call into question the country’s capacity and resource management,” Uzcategui told CNN.
Amid the lack of information, some Venezuelans have turned to unofficial websites to obtain information about the number of missing people.
One such venue is “Venezuela Reporta,” a crowdsourced database of missing person flyers. This database estimates that tens of thousands of people are missing after the earthquake. CNN cannot verify the numbers provided by the database.
A Venezuelan entrepreneur living in Miami told CNN that he created the database using Claude code hours after the earthquake. He asked CNN to withhold his name, saying he was obfuscating the true number of deaths for fear of retaliation from the Venezuelan government.
“This is now information warfare,” he told CNN. The government cannot reveal the actual number of deaths because “ultimately it would show that they were extremely inefficient.”
The government said it was assessing the number of people in the worst-hit areas at the time of the earthquake. National Assembly Speaker Jorge Rodríguez, the brother of acting President Delcy Rodríguez, said on Tuesday that about 30,000 people had been evacuated to the worst-hit areas of La Guaira state, of whom about 20,000 had fled or been rescued.
A pathologist speaking to CNN from Caracas said his colleagues are overwhelmed. Although Venezuela has received significant aid from abroad in rescue and recovery missions, there are still no volunteer pathologists available to help prepare and identify the bodies.
She said so many bodies were so badly decomposed that mourners were forced to identify them by tattoos, dental work or clothing. DNA testing is too expensive in Venezuela.
“So many children are arriving and they are so decomposed that their families don’t recognize them,” she said. It was a huge burden on her. “I’m not sleeping well. It’s terrible.”
Karelis Dwento took a daylong bus ride from San Felix to Caracas, where she identified her 22-year-old brother at a mortuary. She told CNN she was exhausted. She said her brother was pulled from the collapsed building on the first night of the quake, but died from his injuries late Tuesday night.
“I identified him because of the tattoo here,” she said, pointing to her neck. “I have other family members who have passed away.”
All told, 12 members of Dwendt’s family are still missing, and three of them, including his brother, were found dead. She was waiting outside for her brother’s body when CNN left her at the morgue. She doesn’t know how she will pay for the funeral.
