The Japan Times - 'I'm going with him': families fear for bodies of Venezuela's quake dead

He must stay with the body of his nephew Oswall, which was pulled out of the rubble of his residence that collapsed in Venezuela’s twin earthquakes.

After fighting to recover his remains, Colivert fears the body will be lost in the chaos following the disaster.

"Even if I have to go to China, to wherever, but I’m not leaving him alone," said Colivert.

Ten days after one of Latin America’s worst earthquake disasters, attention is turning increasingly away from possible rescues of survivors to recovery of the bodies of loved ones.

Where Oswall's body was recovered, hundreds of volunteers worked in mountains of rubble from a complex built as part of former president Hugo Chávez’s flagship housing program in La Guaira, the epicentre of the June 24 earthquakes that left nearly 3,000 dead.

Colivert lost his sister, Grecia, her husband, and her two children, Oswall and Greidy. They were among the hundreds of low-income families living in the 12-story towers, known as OPP (Works of People's Power) 26 and 27.

Using drills and pliers, Mexican soldiers struggled Friday night to extract the body of 16-year-old Greidy, trapped under a beam.

The body of 13-year-old Oswall had been taken out earlier and remained for hours in a black bag next to his family. They stopped forensic experts from removing it for fear they would never find it again.

"I'm going with him," Colivert, 36, told AFP.

Grecia's body, located Thursday, was taken by her father to be cremated in Caracas, while Víctor awaited the remains of his nephews and brother-in-law.

Venezuela's interim president Delcy Rodríguez has given assurances that all bodies would be identified. "No one is going to a mass grave," she said on Thursday.

She said forensic experts would take fingerprints and photographs of the deceased and create a file for each body brought to the morgue.

But some are losing faith.

"I had a lot of hope for my family; I'm a Christian," says Miguel Ángel Colivert, Víctor's uncle.

But he admits he lost faith when his niece's body was found.

"My soul aches!"

With a Bible in his hand, a Mexican priest offers prayers where the bodies lie.

Activity is intense at the ruins of this complex, built about 13 years ago as part of the Housing Mission program, promoted by the late former president Chávez.

A group of volunteers passes buckets of rubble from hand to hand in long lines. Drills can be heard piercing the cement until someone shouts "Silence!" with a raised fist.

Everything stops for a few minutes.

"This is a horror movie. We didn’t have to survive a war, but we could not against nature," says Celida Sequera, a 43-year-old volunteer with her face and clothes covered in dirt.

The housewife was accompanying a friend who lost everything. His wife and three children -- ages six, 10, and 12 -- were lying in bed when a wall collapsed on them during last week’s 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes.

"Since everything was devastated, they couldn't be found, but we finally located them today," she said.

The rescue team pulled on a rope to haul a volunteer out of the hole where they plan to extract the bodies of the woman and her children.

Volunteers and relatives of the victims rest under blankets tied to four poles driven into the rubble, which reeks of death.

A mud-stained Venezuelan flag, tied to a pole, flutters in the Caribbean breeze.

A blackened mattress, a twisted bicycle, a crushed sofa and toys protrude between two stacked concrete slabs.

Seeing all this, a woman kneels and cries out between sobs.

"My soul aches!"

Y.Ishikawa--JT