The death toll from the two earthquakes that struck Venezuela on June 24 has risen to 4,333, National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez told reporters on Saturday, July 11, 2026. He said 16,740 people have been injured, 6,462 people have been rescued and about 17,000 have been left homeless. Three hundred and fifteen of the dead have not yet been identified.
Who Pays When the Ground Gives Way
Those numbers are the human cost of a disaster that has left families sorting through rubble, missing names and bodies that still haven’t been identified. Rodriguez said acting President Delcy Rodriguez will allocate the first 200 homes to those affected next week, but he gave no more details. He also said distribution of housing to those affected will begin next week. For the people sleeping without roofs, next week is what the apparatus calls urgency.
Rodriguez said authorities’ preliminary estimates show 25,000 homes are needed. He said 856 buildings were affected, and 190 either collapsed completely or suffered structural collapse. Authorities have already identified around 40 plots of land, totaling about 584,000 square meters, for housing projects in Osma and Chuspa. Search operations are still continuing, and Rodriguez said, “As long as there is life, there is hope. We still have one or two sites where the situation remains uncertain, active sites where we are searching for survivors.”
What People Did Before the State Showed Up
The official rescue tally says 6,462 people have been rescued, but the story on the ground is uglier and more revealing. In La Guaira, 17-year-old high school student Maria Alejandra Sanz survived 17 hours trapped under rubble after the June 24 quakes. She said she lay in near-darkness beneath the collapsed building in the coastal town where she had grown up, drinking her own urine to survive and assuming the other members of her dance troupe were dead.
Of the group of 10 friends who had been preparing a routine for their high school graduation, four did not make it out alive. Sanz said, “I’m fine,” during an interview in front of her former home nine days after the disaster, though she said it unconvincingly. Earlier that day, rescuers had pulled the body of her friend Gonzalo Marquez from the rubble. She said she had gone up to the third-floor apartment she shared with her parents about 20 minutes before the quakes struck to get water for Marquez, petted her dog Bruna for the last time and was about to reach the water when the building started to shake at 6:04 p.m.
She moved to the nearest door frame and seconds later was engulfed in darkness as the floors below her gave way. The door frame fell over her midsection diagonally, shielding her from a collapsed wall. Sanz said she saw a sliver of light across her fingers and knew she was not buried too deep. She was able to free her feet by slipping out of the oversized sneakers she was given for the dance performance. She said she knew her own urine might offer her only chance to drink, so she caught what she could in her hand and raised it to her mouth. The light soon faded and she prayed, thinking, “If I have to die, let it be while I’m asleep.”
Late Hands, Bare Hands, No Equipment
Sanz woke to light falling across her hand again and began clawing toward it, wedging her body slowly between chunks of concrete and making a hole she could fit through in the wall above her. When she emerged with half her body free, she yelled out to a neighbor for help. Her 71-year-old father, who had been outside along with his wife at the time of the quakes, sprinted up the pile of debris. The teen hung on to him in a mental fog. When she got to her mother, Sanz learned that five of her 10 friends had escaped unscathed.
Jeffry Campos, the father of the trapped girl Isa Campos, arrived at the scene within two hours of the disaster and spent all night plunging into the mass of concrete and steel with the father of another dancer. By 11 a.m., a Caracas police unit joined the effort, using only their bare hands. The equipment they needed to pull Isa Campos from between two beams never arrived. Known for her intelligence and electric energy, she died some 24 hours after the quakes. Her body remains in the rubble.
Her father said outside a church where a mass was held in his daughter’s honor, “Help arrived late,” and added, “Rescue workers, firemen and the military did not arrive until two or three days later.” That’s the hierarchy speaking in plain language: families digging, volunteers hauling, police arriving empty-handed, and the official rescue machine showing up after the worst had already happened.
After seeing a TikTok video about the trapped dancers the night of the quakes, civil engineer Andres Ganscka set out from his home in central Colombia with hydraulic and power jacks, hand tools, diapers and baby cream. He said, “I saw it and thought, ‘That could be my daughter,’” and described himself as a father of three. He arrived the next night to a disaster site strewn with bodies and limbs. He coordinated volunteer rescue workers at the Sanz family’s building, scouring the rubble for the missing dancers and 15 other children who had been playing table tennis inside. Venezuelan authorities finally arrived three days after him. In total, Ganscka spent around $35,000 on the rescue effort.
Sanz and Marquez both had places at universities in Caracas; he planned to study engineering and she was focused on architecture. They talked about staying in Venezuela to build a better country. Sanz said that when Marquez was assigned the desk next to hers during their freshman year, she didn’t think much of him, but by senior year they were inseparable friends. Though not outwardly funny in the beginning of their relationship, he would later constantly tease her with his sarcastic jokes. They were Mr. and Mrs. Claus at the school’s Christmas performance. When not dancing, they practiced piano.
Sanz said, “He was often the only boy, he didn’t care what anyone thought, full of personality and the protector of the crew.” She said the once-active group chat in which they would coordinate costumes, set design and practice times has largely fallen silent, and that the other survivors drift between numbness and grief, okay one moment and crying the next. She said, “We talked about how we weren’t going to see each other after graduation, we talked about how Gonzalo looked like his dad and would have gray hair. They’ll stay young forever, always young.”