Many of the 146 Venezuelans deported from the United States the day the earthquake struck are feared dead. Listen · 10:05 min Share full article0The damaged state-run holding facility for deportees, on a hilltop in La Guaira, Venezuela, was meant to be a way station for a group that arrived there on Wednesday, June 26. Most of them never made it home. Credit...Vantor, via ReutersBy Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Patricia Sulbarán The plane carrying 146 Venezuelans deported from the United States arrived at Venezuela’s main airport last Wednesday — just eight hours before the ground began to violently shake. Venezuelan officials welcomed the deportees — 120 men, 19 women and 7 children — and recorded carefully staged videos celebrating their arrival after spending weeks in U.S. detention centers. Most, if not all, were then ferried away from the cameras to a state-run holding facility, where they settled into bunk beds and were told they would be released the next day, after being processed, two deportees told The New York Times. But as the sun began to set, the building started to sway, and what was supposed to be a bittersweet homecoming turned into one of the countless devastating tragedies to emerge from the back-to-back earthquakes that ravaged Venezuela last week. Inside, the deportees screamed and scrambled to escape as the walls and ceilings fell around them, burying most of them beneath a hulking pile of rubble, two survivors told The Times. Ninoska Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 45, said she rushed out of the room where she had been placed with other women on the first floor and barreled down a hallway, pushed and pulled by other deportees desperate to flee, when a wall pinned her legs. She was trapped near two unresponsive men who had been struck on the head by metal beams. She yelled for about 45 minutes — “Auxilio!” “Help!” — until she dug herself out of the rubble. Outside the flattened building, government officials loaded six survivors into a van. Ms. Gutiérrez Rodríguez said she ran into four other deportees, dust-covered and disoriented, stumbling in the darkness. “We were anxious to return to our country to be free again,” said Ms. Gutiérrez Rodríguez, who had been detained by U.S. immigration officials in Miami after nearly two years in the United States. “For this to happen is terrible, absolutely terrible.” As rescuers continue to recover bodies across Venezuela, pushing the death toll past 1,900 on Tuesday, the fate of Venezuelans deported by the Trump administration the same day the earthquake struck has thrust their relatives into an agonizing search for answers. The Venezuelan government has not said how many deportees were in the building, which was perched on a hilltop in La Guaira, the hardest-hit state, or how many died. The government did not respond to requests for comment, and the families of the deportees said it has provided them with little information and restricted access to the facility. Accounts from the families, shared in interviews with The Times, suggested that many of the deportees may have perished, their bodies recovered or still trapped in the rubble. Only a handful of survivor accounts have trickled out. “No one wants to lose a family member, and if he is dead, at least tell us where his body is so we can give him the Christian burial he deserves,” said Glina Audivet, 42, whose brother, Ángel Romero, 31, was still missing. “He went to the United States in search of a better future, because unfortunately, there isn’t one in Venezuela.” Left to fend for themselves, families have traveled from across Venezuela to La Guaira to demand answers from government officials. They have resorted to desperate pleas on social media, sharing pictures of their missing loved ones. And they have organized through a WhatsApp group called Vuelo 164 — or Flight 164, the flight number used by Venezuelan officials. Their searches have often turned into days of anguish as they sift through decomposing bodies at morgues and hospitals, on the lookout for the identifying bracelets the deportees were given when they landed in Caracas, the country’s capital. Anyela Escandela Reyes said she had bought her son, Arturo Alejandro Morales Escandela, 24, new clothes and organized a surprise party, filled with balloons and pictures of him, to welcome him home after he had been detained while driving in Texas. He called her from the holding facility on Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Reyes said, and asked for his grandmother’s address, where Venezuelan officials were supposed to drop him off. But a few hours later, the ground began to shake, and she never heard from him again. His relatives set out on a more than 10-hour drive to La Guaira, rushing from hospital to hospital over three days, until they found his remains. They were able to identify him by a tattoo on his arm. The family buried him a few hours later in a rushed funeral because his body was badly decomposed. “I was waiting with a welcoming hug,” Ms. Escandela Reyes said, sobbing. “Not a farewell hug.” Her son and other deportees had traveled on one of the three weekly deportation flights that have returned tens of thousands of Venezuelans to their homeland as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on migrants. Many traveled north in the past few years, risking their lives in a dangerous trek as millions of Venezuelans fled an economic collapse and the country’s authoritarian regime. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment on whether deportations would be paused as a result of the earthquakes, which damaged the international airport outside Caracas. But there have been no deportation flights to Venezuela since last Wednesday, according to online flight trackers. The facility where the deportees were held — a four-story, concrete refuge with a brick roof — was run by Venezuela’s intelligence services, known as SEBIN, an arm of Venezuela’s repressive regime. The force has a long history of political suppression and human rights violations, from torture to arbitrary detentions. At least one survivor told The Times that the SEBIN had threatened him to remain quiet about what had happened at the facility. The survivor, José, who requested to be identified only by his first name for fear of retribution, said he was lying down in a bunk bed on the second floor when the earthquake struck, forcing dozens of deportees to flee and creating a bottleneck. “There were about 20 of us piled on top of each other, and about 12 of us made it out,” José said, describing how they pushed themselves toward an opening in the rubble where he saw light shine through from outside. “We, the deportees ourselves, were helping our fellow detainees.” He said multiple SEBIN officials and two firefighters arrived at the building but they did little to search for survivors. At least some SEBIN officers and facility workers also died during the building’s collapse, two survivors said. José said he was eventually transported to a SEBIN base near the airport, where he was joined by women and children who had survived. Relatives of missing deportees also accused the Venezuelan government of not prioritizing a search for survivors and of providing scant information: The government shared phone numbers where the families could call, but the phone lines appeared to be down. Daniely Pastora Hurtado Suárez, 32, said she was one of the first relatives to reach the facility on Wednesday night, searching for her husband, Eduardo José Ozal Mujica, 32, who had lived in Colorado and was detained by U.S. officials while making food deliveries. She returned day after day and saw SEBIN officials eventually cordoning off the facility as more families gathered at the site. She and other relatives said they saw little rescue activity at the facility, even as families clamored to be let in to search themselves. She eventually found her husband’s body on Sunday at a makeshift morgue in La Guaira that was filled with the foul stench of death. The bodies were so mangled, she said, that she almost took the wrong body home. Ms. Pastora Hurtado said she was filled with guilt: She had convinced her husband to migrate to the United States three years ago so he could find a stable job and send money to give their 8-year-old son, Fernando José, a better future. “My husband didn’t want to leave Venezuela,” she said over tears in a phone interview. “You don’t know how happy he was when they finally told him he was being sent to Venezuela.”
Original Source: NYTimes
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