The death toll in Venezuela rose to 1,430 on Saturday, Jorge Rodriguez, the leader of Venezuela’s National Assembly, said on state TV. Four days after the twin earthquakes struck, rescue teams are still pulling survivors from the rubble — and still counting the dead.
OPB reported the desperation mounting across La Guaira as the fourth day stretched into the fifth. In addition to the $150 million already committed to the response, the Trump administration was preparing “an additional package right now of nine figures that we’re going to announce in the next day or so.”
Two teams from Miami-Dade, Florida had been activated and federalized — the first time in over a decade the State Department deployed urban search and rescue teams beyond the standard two. ABC News’ live update tracker confirmed that US teams had repaired one of the runways at Simón Bolívar airport. That single fact — a foreign military repairing a Venezuelan airport runway — captures how complete the infrastructure collapse has been.
Acting President Delcy Rodriguez said electric services had been restored to about 60% of pre-earthquake levels. More than 14,000 officials were working in La Guaira, the hard-hit area north of Caracas. Access to that area remained restricted as military and civil protection searched the wreckage. At least 30 search teams from various countries were searching the rubble, according to the UN.
More than 50,000 people remain unaccounted for on independent tracking websites — a number that likely reflects communication blackouts rather than confirmed casualties, but one that the government has not publicly contradicted. Miyamoto International’s earthquake update confirmed the seismic parameters — a 7.2 foreshock followed 39 seconds later by a 7.5 mainshock — making this the largest recorded Venezuelan earthquake in more than a century.
The USGS has predicted the death toll could exceed 100,000 — a figure Wikipedia’s 2026 Venezuela earthquakes article notes is the agency’s upper-bound modelled estimate based on population density and building vulnerability in the affected zones.
For Pakistan, which sits on the same type of active fault zone and lost 73,000 in the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, Venezuela is not a distant disaster. It is a preview of what poor building codes and weak emergency infrastructure produce when the earth moves. The earthquake did not destroy Venezuela. Its buildings did.
