LA GUAIRA, Venezuela — Maria Alejandra Sanz looked away the moment she learned rescue workers had recovered the lifeless body of one of her closest friends from the wreckage of a building destroyed by twin earthquakes that hit the state of La Guaira in northern Venezuela last month.
The 17-year-old had spent 17 agonizing hours pinned beneath the collapsed structure in the coastal town where she had spent her entire life. The June 24 quakes brought the building down around her, forcing her to drink her own urine to stay alive while she assumed the other members of her dance group had all perished.
Of the ten friends who had been rehearsing a routine for their upcoming high school graduation, four would not make it out alive.
“I’m fine,” Sanz said without conviction during an interview held in front of what used to be her home, nine days after the disaster. The air around her was still thick with dust and sorrow. Earlier that same day, rescuers had recovered the body of her friend, Gonzalo Marquez, from the debris.
A flood of questions she could not answer followed: Would her friends still be alive if help had come faster? Would things have turned out differently if the group had been practicing somewhere else? What if she had stayed downstairs with Marquez instead of going up to get him water? Why does she get to go to university when he does not?
Sanz and her friends had grown up amid economic collapse, mass migration and authoritarian rule. They began 2026 with cautious hope, believing that the U.S. removal of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro might finally open the door to a better future.
Then the earthquakes struck. The government reports that more than 4,000 people have been killed and nearly 17,000 others injured.
Saved by a Friend’s Thirst
In the weeks before the disaster, the dance troupe had been practicing seven days a week, sometimes rehearsing until 3 a.m. On the evening of June 24, they were in the ground-floor party hall of Sanz’s building, working on their moves to “Dangerous,” a 1991 Michael Jackson song. Graduation was just three days away.
About 20 minutes before the quakes hit, Marquez asked Sanz to bring him some water. She headed up to the third-floor apartment she shared with her parents, paused to pet her dog Bruna one final time, and was just about to grab the water when the building began to shake at 6:04 p.m.
She stepped into the nearest doorframe. Seconds later, darkness swallowed her as the floors below collapsed. A doorframe fell diagonally across her midsection, acting as a shield against a crumbling wall.
A thin sliver of light visible across her fingers told her she wasn’t buried too deeply. She managed to free her feet by sliding out of the oversized sneakers she had been wearing for the dance performance.
Knowing that her own urine might be her only source of hydration, she caught what she could in her hand and brought it to her lips. As the light disappeared, she prayed.
“If I have to die, let it be while I’m asleep,” she recalled thinking in that moment.
When light returned, Sanz woke and began clawing toward it, slowly squeezing her body through chunks of concrete until she carved out an opening large enough to escape through.
With half her body free, she called out to a neighbor for help. Her 71-year-old father, who had been outside with his wife when the quakes struck, ran up the pile of rubble to reach her. Still in a daze, she held onto him tightly. When she finally reached her mother, she learned that five of her ten friends had escaped without injury.
“What about Gonzalo? Isa?” she asked.
There was no word yet on Marquez, but volunteer rescuers reported that Isa Campos — a friend Sanz had known her entire life — had been spotted conscious beneath the rubble. She was alive, they said. At the time, that was true.
‘That Could Be My Daughter’
Jeffry Campos, Isa’s father, arrived at the scene within two hours of the disaster and spent the entire night digging through concrete and steel alongside the father of another dancer. By 11 a.m. the following day, a Caracas police unit joined the effort — working with only their bare hands.
The specialized equipment needed to free Isa from between two beams never came. Known for her sharp mind and vibrant energy, she died roughly 24 hours after the earthquakes. Her body remains in the rubble.
“Help arrived late,” her father said outside a church where a memorial mass was held in her honor. “Rescue workers, firemen and the military did not arrive until two or three days later.”
Civil engineer Andres Ganscka saw a TikTok video about the trapped dancers the night of the earthquakes and immediately set out from his home in central Colombia. He loaded his vehicle with hydraulic and power jacks, hand tools, diapers and baby cream.
“I saw it and thought, ‘That could be my daughter,’” said Ganscka, who has three children of his own.
He arrived the following night to a scene scattered with bodies. He took charge of coordinating volunteer rescue workers at the Sanz family’s building, searching the debris for the missing dancers and 15 other children who had been playing table tennis inside. Venezuelan authorities did not show up until three days after Ganscka had already arrived. In total, he spent approximately $35,000 on the rescue effort.
An Imagined Future, Now Gone
Both Sanz and Marquez had secured spots at universities in Caracas. He had planned to study engineering; she was set to pursue architecture. They had spoken about staying in Venezuela to help rebuild the country.
Like many young Venezuelans, they had watched their parents endure more than a decade of economic crisis, political turmoil and violence, while friends and family members left for other countries. The capture of Maduro by U.S. forces during a January raid had felt like a reason to hope.
When Marquez was assigned the desk beside hers during their freshman year, Sanz says she didn’t think much of it. By senior year, the two were inseparable. Though he wasn’t particularly funny at first, he later became known for his constant sarcastic jokes. They played Mr. and Mrs. Claus together at the school’s Christmas show and, when not dancing, practiced piano side by side.
“He was often the only boy, he didn’t care what anyone thought, full of personality and the protector of the crew,” Sanz said.
The group chat where they once coordinated costumes, set designs and rehearsal schedules has gone mostly quiet. Sanz says the surviving members of the group move between numbness and grief — fine one moment, in tears the next.
“We talked about how we weren’t going to see each other after graduation, we talked about how Gonzalo looked like his dad and would have gray hair,” Sanz said. “They’ll stay young forever, always young.”
