Venezuela earthquake death toll rises to 2295

A week after the deadly twin earthquakes in Venezuela, the official death count still strikes both Venezuelans and outside observers as remarkably low. Venezuelan authorities said Wednesday at least 2,295 people were killed in the earthquakes, an increase of around 300 from the previous day’s update.
One forensic pathologist, who asked to remain anonymous due to her fear of retaliation, told CNN she believes the government death toll to be a vast undercount, amounting to “not even a third of what is actually there.”

The pathologist said the makeshift morgue where she works in the port city of La Guaira, an area badly impacted by the quakes, is processing around 400 bodies a day, many of them battered beyond recognition or in advanced states of decay. There’s no more room in the refrigerated trucks, forcing them to place body bags outside in the sun, where they decompose quickly.

She is not alone in her skepticism. Opposition politicians like María Corina Machado have accused the government of downplaying the level of destruction. Venezuelans abroad have constructed unofficial avenues to report missing people, as the government has not yet provided an official figure.

There are still many people unseen beneath the rubble of the collapsed high-rise buildings, and it may take some time for a full picture of the casualties to emerge. CNN has reached out to the Venezuelan government to ask how it conducts its count and for estimates on how many people are considered missing in the aftermath of the earthquakes.

“La Guaira is indescribable,” said the pathologist. “There are so many cases, so many families. (The earthquakes) hit the lower-income families the hardest – they are the most affected.”

Many of these families bring corpses of family members whom they’ve dug from the wreckage themselves.

“They themselves bring their own dead, because civil protection, the firefighters, even the emergency services cannot keep up with rescuing those bodies,” she said.

Initial estimates from the US Geological Survey said that there is a high chance that tens of thousands of people died in the back-to-back 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes. The Venezuelan government, beyond its daily death toll updates, has not provided an estimate of its own for the final number of deceased.

“We are definitely looking at a number higher than the one already reported,” Gianluca Rampolla del Tindaro, the United Nations’ coordinator for Venezuela, said at a Tuesday press conference.

-CNN