A quest for closure
Posters now crowd walls, lampposts and shopfronts across La Guaira and the capital Caracas. They bear the faces of the dead.
As rescue efforts continue, families search for their loved ones, hoping they will be among the 6,462 people rescued so far.
But some face the grim prospect of identifying the dead. Inside an air-conditioned room at a funeral parlour in La Guaira, small wooden boxes line the floor, containing the remains of those who have already been identified and cremated.
Staff say they have lost count of the bodies that have passed through since the earthquake. It has taken a psychological toll.
“I went five days without sleeping — days and nights spent with people, living through their pain,” Santiago Rodriguez, who works at the funeral parlour, told Al Jazeera.
Every day, Rodriguez sees new families arriving at the funeral parlour, looking for their missing relatives.
But many leave without answers. Some bodies have been buried without names, though photographs have been taken in case they can be identified later.
Fingerprints can no longer be taken: Many bodies are now too decomposed.
Workers in white forensic overalls can be seen throughout the day lugging corpses out of the building to stack in a van. Many of the bodies are being transported to a mass grave in La Esperanza, La Guaira.
Rodriguez fears a situation similar to what Venezuela experienced in 1999, when mudslides in La Guaira killed an estimated 30,000 people in this region.
The death toll was so high, and the devastation so vast, that some victims were never found. The same is likely to happen this time, Rodriguez said.
A preliminary report from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimates that the earthquake created 1.2 million tonnes of debris across La Guaira. Entire city blocks were flattened.
“When they start removing all that rubble, the machines will destroy the remains of many bodies,” Rodriguez said.
He also believes the lack of government assistance has cost lives.
While human rights groups have criticised the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela for violently suppressing dissent, Rodriguez said he is no longer scared.
“The authorities have not really appeared at all,” he said. “We lost some of our family. I lost my two grandchildren — my daughter’s two children. What else do I have to lose?”
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