More than a month after Venezuela’s earthquakes: ‘I’m not leaving here until my son is found’

More than a month after the June twenty-fourth earthquakes struck Venezuela, families are still camped beside collapsed buildings in La Guaira, searching for missing loved ones. Global Voices reports that fifty-year-old Miriam Villalta has lived in a tent for over fifteen days near the Luisa Cáceres de Arismendi housing complex, where her son was living when Tower D collapsed; she has found no trace of him in hospitals, shelters, or morgues. As of July twenty-second, Venezuela's government reported more than five thousand three hundred deaths and nearly eighteen thousand people left homeless, though officials have not released a missing-persons count — even as independent estimates put that number near forty thousand. Relatives, many of them women, continue clearing rubble by hand while aid, they say, has steadily declined.

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