What happened
Venezuela Monday raised the death toll from last week’s powerful earthquakes to 1,719 people, with another 5,034 injured and 15,866 displaced. The numbers are expected to keep rising.
Among the missing are more than 100 Venezuelans who arrived in La Guaira on a U.S. deportation flight hours before the back-to-back quakes struck, The Associated Press said. The government-run hotel where they were brought for medical screenings and ID cards collapsed.
Who said what
The 146 Venezuelans on the deportation flight from Miami included 19 women and seven children, according to Human Rights First’s ICE Flight Monitor. Venezuela’s repatriation agency showed one family a list of 32 survivors from the flight, but most are believed to have died, Reuters said. Relatives “have questioned why deportees were taken there and why their phones and documents were withheld, complicating efforts to find and identify them.”
What next?
The search for survivors “was growing increasingly desperate” Monday, five days after the quakes, The New York Times said. “Frustration is growing” with Venezuela’s “U.S.-backed government” and what critics call its “slow and inept” response, NPR said. Venezuela’s “thousands of police and army troops” have been “slow to arrive” and hindered rescue efforts by “demanding government permits from doctors and rescue workers.”
They arrived in La Guaira on a deportation flight hours before the disaster struck