CARACAS — Construction worker Anderson Daniel Salcedo had spent three months locked in U.S. immigration detention before stepping onto a repatriation flight last Wednesday. He touched down in Venezuela just hours before a pair of devastating earthquakes struck his homeland.
The 22-year-old, a passionate soccer fan, had spent more than three years living in the United States, sending money back home so his mother could build a house. After landing at Maiquetia airport near the capital Caracas, Salcedo and more than 140 fellow returning migrants — among them seven children — were transported to the nearby government-operated Hotel Santuario La Llanada, perched on a hilltop with views of the Caribbean Sea, where they were to wait for processing.
What happened next was catastrophic. Venezuela’s most powerful earthquakes in over a century tore through coastal La Guaira state, bringing the hotel down and, according to relatives, likely killing the majority of the deportees sheltering inside.
Salcedo made it out alive, but with life-altering injuries. Now, his family — along with relatives of others lost in the collapse — are raising serious questions about why returning migrants were placed at that location, and why their phones and identification documents were confiscated, which made it far harder to locate and identify survivors.
Venezuela’s Return to the Homeland Grand Mission, the government program responsible for receiving returning migrants, did not respond to questions from Reuters. Three days after the earthquakes, the program posted a message of condolence on its social media account along with phone numbers for families to call.
“We express our deepest sorrow and solidarity over the tragic loss of life caused by the recent earthquakes,” the post read. “Today we embrace each other in grief, but tomorrow we will rise stronger. We are a people of light, resilience, and hope; together, step by step, we will overcome this trial and find our way home again. You are not alone.”
Venezuelan authorities report that at least 1,750 people died in the earthquakes, which destroyed or seriously damaged more than 850 buildings, injured thousands more, and left approximately 16,000 people without homes. A website run by the country’s political opposition lists roughly 45,000 people as still unaccounted for.
Satellite images from Vantor show a large portion of the hotel reduced to a heap of concrete and twisted metal, with broken roof tiles strewn across the wreckage. Part of the structure remained standing.
Two families of passengers on the deportation flight — who connected through social media and began sharing missing-person notices — told Reuters that 12 people managed to escape the debris on their own. One family was shown an official list from the Grand Mission indicating 32 survivors from the flight.
Salcedo was pulled from the rubble 40 hours after the quakes struck, according to his grandmother, Marlene Lozano, speaking by phone from her home in Nueva Bolivia in Merida, roughly 700 kilometers (430 miles) from La Guaira. A video circulated among the families shows Salcedo being extracted from a hole in the debris by several men, his face twisted in pain as one rescuer says, “we’ll pull him right now.”
Salcedo’s family said SEBIN, Venezuela’s domestic intelligence agency, had taken his phone and identity card before the disaster. The Communications Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
“He spent 40 hours in that hole, he didn’t have an ID, they couldn’t account for him because he had no documents,” Lozano said. “We had no way to communicate with him and didn’t know anything.”
A relative eventually located Salcedo at University Hospital in Caracas and contacted his aunt. His mother made the journey to the city by motorcycle with her husband.
“She went straight to the hospital, and that’s where she found him — but they had already amputated his legs. Because he had a lot, a lot of debris on top of his legs,” Lozano said.
Salcedo remains intubated. A doctor told the family that the damage to his legs was worsened by how he was removed from the wreckage.
“Here we are praying, asking God to give him strength and courage,” Lozano said. “We are trusting in God, that God will keep him alive as he is. We know he won’t be the same anymore — he’s missing his legs — but we love him, just the way he is.”
Lozano said the family has received no official information. When she visited the local SEBIN office, she was told they had nothing to share.
Another family is facing a similar ordeal. Oswadeliz Nunez, an industrial engineer and lawyer, has been unable to get any official word about her 28-year-old son, Daniel Nunez, who arrived on the same flight. When he landed, Daniel borrowed a phone and told his mother he was being taken to a hotel and would be released to go home the next day.
“Thank God my son called me, because otherwise I would never have spoken to him again,” Nunez said.
She rushed to La Guaira from El Tigre, in Anzoategui state — about 470 kilometers (290 miles) southeast of Caracas — and was told by a SEBIN official that her son had been taken away by ambulance. She could not find him at any clinic or hospital. She was later shown an official list on which her son appears as missing.
Nunez said SEBIN personnel have been digging through the rubble by hand, and that heavy machinery did not arrive at the site until Monday.
“We are earnestly asking the international community to help us recover the bodies, because if it was God’s will that my son was there, I want my son’s body. I can’t wait one or two months until the government decides to remove the bodies,” she said.
She added that had her son been allowed to go directly home upon arrival, he would still be alive.
“They did not commit any crime. They were already in their country, they had already been deported.”
