They rescue Hernán, the Venezuelan who had been trapped for eight days in the rubble of the earthquakes, alive.

BarcelonaRescue teams have freed Hernán Gil alive, a 47-year-old man who had been trapped for almost a week under the rubble of a collapsed building in La Guaira, Venezuela, following the two earthquakes that shook the country last week. More than a hundred operatives participated in an international operation led by Chilean firefighters that lasted nearly 72 hours.

Rescuers had been working non-stop for more than two days to reach Hernán, who was the building's doorman. According to emergency teams, the man remained alive in the building's guardhouse and was receiving food and hydration through a tube while rescue efforts progressed.

The so-called "miracle operation" brought together specialists from Chile, the United States, Portugal, and Costa Rica, who worked together on a particularly delicate intervention to avoid further collapses. Hernán's wife spent the entire week at the foot of the building, accompanying the medical teams and waiting for him to be rescued.

The earthquakes, with magnitudes of 7.5 and 7.2, have caused nearly 2,300 deaths and more than 11,000 injuries, according to Venezuelan authorities. This Thursday, the World Health Organization warned that the death toll could increase considerably in the coming days, as 72 hours after the earthquake, the probability of finding survivors is greatly reduced. The UN estimates that the final number of missing persons could rise to 50,000, and few are expected to be rescued alive.

Years of lack of investment

The WHO also recognizes that the disaster's impact on health services and health personnel has increased due to "years of underinvestment and financial crisis", and that tens of thousands of professionals have left Venezuela to work. The organization has reported that before the earthquakes there were "serious shortages" of supplies.

On Monday, another earthquake of magnitude 4.2 shook an area in northern Venezuela. The tremor, which forced many people to leave their homes again, had a depth of 2.9 kilometers and its epicenter was located ten kilometers east of La Guaira, one of the cities most affected by the two earthquakes on June 24.

Since then, hundreds of volunteers have been working with almost no equipment to try to find survivors and recover the lifeless bodies buried under the rubble. Authorities have not stopped promising heavy machinery to help with rescue efforts, which are arriving in trickles to the most affected areas, where the stench of corpses is becoming unbearable for a population that sleeps wherever it can and in poor conditions.

Despite this, Venezuela has benefited from a wave of international solidarity, with 25 teams from seventeen countries deployed, totaling more than a thousand rescuers. However, some countries have already begun to withdraw their personnel, given the few options that surprises like the rescue of Hernán Gil can still occur.