A woman has described crawling out of the rubble of a hotel after it collapsed when the deadly twin earthquakes struck Venezuela last Wednesday.
“I had a beam on top of me, trapping me. I couldn’t feel my legs,” Ninoska Gutierrez told CNN. “I couldn’t believe it, I don’t know if I was conscious or not. Everything was so fast.”
“I asked God, why did you allow this?”
She miraculously escaped with only a few scrapes and bruises, before walking for two miles to find help.
Gutierrez had fled Venezuela in 2018 and had been living as an undocumented immigrant in the United States. She was one of 146 people onboard the deportation flight from Miami, along with 19 women and seven children who landed on 24 June, according to ICE Flight Monitor, an initiative of Human Rights First. They were then transported to a hotel in La Guaira, one of the worst hit areas.
Hours later the worst earthquake disaster in over a century struck Venezuela, with a magnitude of 7.2 and 7.5. At least 2,200 people have been killed, with more than 10,000 injured, and 50,000 missing, according to the UN.
More than 100 Venezuelans who were deported from the United States remain missing.
Among the missing is 23-year-old Abelardo Rincón, who had lived in Georgia for six years, where he worked in a car dealership. He was expecting a baby girl with his wife before he was detained by US authorities and sent back to Venezuela.
Information has been limited in the chaotic aftermath, with friends and family members struggling to find their loved ones.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees US immigration enforcement agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said in a statement to the BBC: “This flight safely reached Venezuela and all illegal aliens on board were returned home. When an individual is no longer in ICE custody, ICE is no longer responsible for them.”
Rincón’s grandfather, Jose Rincón, told BBC Mundo that he had visited the local morgue in the capital Caracas to try to find his grandson, viewing at least 200 bodies.
He even attempted to visit the destroyed hotel, where the deportees were staying, but Venezuelan authorities had blocked access to it.
Search and rescue teams have been working to save survivors trapped under the rubble. A newborn baby was found alive with his mother after surviving for 32 hours under a collapsed building, which was hailed as a “miracle” and a symbol of hope.
But now the critical 72-hour window for rescuing people still trapped beneath the rubble has passed.
Some of the deportees who survived told Associated Press that they saw people running, some naked and others barefoot as they emerged from the rubble of the building. Lisbeth Portillo, 58, said she escaped from the destroyed hotel with about 20 other deportees.
“We walked about five kilometers, and I cried and cried … there was no communication,” Portillo said from her home in Maracaibo.
“I was born again; God gave me a second chance,” she said. “I am traumatised.”
Portillo said the government took them to the Hotel Santuario La Llanada, where she was staying in a second floor room with 16 other women. There they underwent medical exams and got identification documents, and were told they would go home the next day.
She told AP she stepped on to a balcony to look at the sea before returning to the room to lay on her bed, and began to feel herself being shaken.
“I fall and end up buried and covered by a beam, but the shaking shifted everything where I was buried and I was able to get out,” said Portillo.
