At 38 seconds, that is all the time that separated the two earthquakes — magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5 — that struck northern Venezuela on June 24, collapsing residential towers across the coastal La Guaira region just north of Caracas and triggering one of the worst seismic disasters in Latin American history. By Saturday, updated official figures had placed the confirmed death toll at 2,954, a rise of more than 300 in a single day, while the United Nations estimated that as many as 50,000 people remain unaccounted for — a figure the Venezuelan government itself has declined to publish.

Ten days on, international rescue teams have begun standing down their operations, a practical acknowledgement that the critical 72-hour window for finding survivors alive has long since closed. Interim President Delcy Rodríguez held a ceremony to award medals to departing foreign teams, including their search dogs. The Los Angeles County fire department confirmed it had ended its searches after detecting no further signs of life; teams from Florida and Virginia were reported to be packing up over the weekend. A small number of survivors were, nevertheless, pulled from the rubble earlier in the week, offering fleeting moments of relief against an otherwise bleak landscape of loss.

The disaster has exposed deep tensions between Venezuelan authorities and the population they govern. Many residents described spending the critical early hours digging through concrete with their bare hands before organised rescue teams — both domestic and international — reached their neighbourhoods. That delay has hardened anger toward a government already struggling for legitimacy.