In spite of himself, Héctor Bello will become a symbol of the tragic earthquake that hit Venezuela, until the last championship defender of the Bolivar Sports Club: in a drama in which numbers become statistics and faces fade, the story of his family is moving the world. It was he who communicated on his Instagram channel on June 26th that his wife Andrea, who was with their daughter in their home in a high building in La Guaira, was found lifeless under the rubble: she shielded the little girl with her body who was saved and escaped with minor injuries: «You will always be our favorite heroine, mother», writes Bello, «I will take care of reminding our little girl how wonderful you were and how much you loved her; I will tell her the story of how you saved her, love, how you gave your own life for our daughter, how you were a courageous woman who, even with your last breath, never abandoned hermother, but there is one thing that I cannot forgive you, mother: you left my soul in pieces, you left me alone to fight. We always said it was a fight for both of us, Mom.”
Meanwhile we are racing against time, the window of 72 is closing beyond which we despair of finding any people alive. The toll is almost a thousand confirmed dead and 50 thousand missing
the most affected area is La Guaita, a town of 40 thousand inhabitants, in the Vargas area.
There are at least three thousand injured and the hospitals are collapsing, there is a lack of ambulances, there are few doctors and we make do with emergency departments set up even on the streets.
International solidarity has been set in motion: the first rescue teams from all over the world are arriving. About a thousand men, 25 rescue teams from 17 countries, including Italy, as well as the UN, are arriving in the area. The situation of the Venezuelan firefighters is also critical
Clearing the roads also means facilitating the arrival of food, water, tents, all the aid necessary to alleviate the suffering of the population of the area: around 70 thousand families in La Guaira alone have spent the second night in the open, sleeping in the car, in makeshift shelters or on the ground. As happened on the first night, in the hours following the earthquake, cases of looting and looting of what remains of the goods in the destroyed shops or houses reduced to rubble continue to be recorded.
To deal with this drama within the drama, within the framework of the state of emergency sanctioned in the hours following the earthquake, Rodríguez again announced the militarization of the State. “With the deployment of personnel from the Bolivarian National Armed Forces, the government intends to guarantee the protection of the affected civilian areas, prevent public disorder and facilitate the free movement of rescue teams, Civil Protection personnel and firefighters engaged in the search for survivors among the rubble,” the president said.
According to estimates by the IOM, the International Organization for Migration, up to 6.8 million people may have been damaged by the earthquake, taking into account that around two million people live in the metropolitan area of Caracas alone.
The Italian-Venezuelan death toll has risen to three dead and five injured, in addition to 35 missing, as announced by Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani from Dubrovnik. Recalling that there are around 150,000 people with Italian citizenship registered as Italians residing in Venezuela, he added worriedly: “We don’t know exactly what will be found under the rubble.”
