Venezuelan Flooding Death Toll Tops 1,000

With the death toll at more than 1,060 and rising after this nation’s worst natural disaster in half a century, Venezuelans on Sunday threw themselves into a massive effort to save and shelter victims of floods that swept shantytowns off hillsides and buried coastal resorts in mud.

Dressed in paratroop fatigues, President Hugo Chavez led a military rescue operation involving warships, 100 helicopters and 12,000 soldiers. As elite paratroopers tried to reach people trapped on rooftops and guarded against looters, homeless victims roamed the ruins searching for provisions and relatives, and officials struggled to determine the human and financial costs of devastating rains that pounded eight states last week.

Some estimates put the death toll well over 5,000, and officials did say the number of dead is expected to increase because there are widespread reports of more cadavers in isolated areas buried under 20 feet of mud or cut off from roads and telephone communication. More than 1,060 corpses had been counted here in coastal Vargas state, where slums lining a mountain outside the capital, Caracas, bore the brunt of the disaster, according to a top fire official.

“I’m only giving you the figures I’m sure of,” said Col. Rodolfo Briceno, fire chief for Caracas and Vargas state. “Some little villages up in the mountains are burying their dead already. It’s not practical to airlift dead bodies when there are still people alive to rescue.”

Briceno added that the injured could total between 5,000 and 10,000. There were an estimated 150,000 displaced persons and about 7,000 missing, though some of the latter might be among those airlifted to dry areas, officials said. And in a nation that was already mired in economic crisis, a Central Bank executive said the damage would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to repair.

Episodes of extraordinary chaos, suffering and solidarity unfolded across the devastated region Sunday. In Los Corales, an area near this coastal community 19 miles north of Caracas, rescue workers searched for Luis Landaeta, a man trapped in a mud-engulfed building, whose ordeal expressed a nation’s anguish when he managed to call a radio station on his cell phone--and was patched in to the president.

After hearing that Landaeta had been trapped in a basement since Thursday with his three children and the corpse of his elderly mother, an emotional Chavez implored: “Luis, my brother, have faith. I’ll be heading there soon. The paratroopers will rescue you if you hang in there.”

Venezuelans tried to hang in there amid the breakdown of daily life in a nation where institutions and infrastructure function erratically even in normal times. The floods shut down both the biggest seaport, which is in La Guaira, and the nearby Simon Bolivar International Airport, which has been converted into a command post and a relay point for refugees being bused or airlifted to Caracas and the interior.

On Sunday, a bedraggled Jenitza Granados stood among 100 people at a fence in the military section of the airport hoping to spot relatives among groups of survivors disgorged by a continuous stream of rescue helicopters. Granados, a slight 37-year-old with a sunken face, had slogged miles through mud and debris looking for 14 missing family members who lived in two beach towns that were virtually washed into the Caribbean.

“It’s been nearly five days, and I’ve heard nothing from them,” she said. “I’ll wait. Hope is the only thing I have.”

Granados was nonetheless lucky because she survived along with her hillside shack, which was buffeted by millions of gallons of water that raged down Mt. Avila north of Caracas.

The wholesale devastation resulted from socioeconomic factors as well as the elements: During the past 30 years, urban sprawl covered Mt. Avila with shantytowns, known as ranchos, whose squalor and geographic vulnerability recall the colonias of Tijuana or the favelas of Brazil.

“This type of catastrophe was bound to happen, whether it was set off by earthquakes or by heavy rains,” said Teolinda Bolivar, an architecture professor at the Central University of Venezuela. “We have known that these structures needed reinforcing, that they were built in potential riverbeds, that they had no foundations at all. That’s the tragedy of [these neighborhoods]: People move there thinking they’ll only have to stay a little while, then spend their whole lives there.”

In fact, after his election a year ago, Chavez unveiled plans to depopulate the shantytowns and move the dwellers to cities to be constructed in the largely barren interior. Describing the damage in Vargas as “immeasurable,” the president said Sunday that relocation plans will be accelerated and the government will offer transport and free farmland in the south to homeless victims.

Chavez also called for more of the solidarity that had already spurred many citizens, notably those in less-damaged well-to-do areas of the capital, to load four-wheel-drive vehicles with provisions and drive them into hillside slums to distribute to victims.

“No family should have to spend Christmas as refugees,” the president told reporters Sunday evening after returning from an aerial tour of the damage in the oil-rich states of Falcon and Zulia. “Anyone who can adopt a family for Christmas and New Year’s, I call upon them to do it.”

But the suffering was by no means limited to the poor. In Caraballeda and other vacation communities popular with the capital’s well-off residents, beachfront mansions toppled into the surf when an avalanche, followed by 3-foot waves, tore through the town last week.

Especially severe climatic conditions contributed to the tragedy. Persistent rain is rare during Venezuela’s six-month wet season, which usually ends in November. But this month, hard rain came every day for two weeks; Vargas endured an average year’s rainfall in only three days, officials said. The skies turned cloudy again Sunday, but no rain had fallen by evening.

“This situation has forced the Venezuelan state to take up the theme of the environment,” Foreign Minister Jose Vicente Rangel told reporters Sunday. “This [disaster] may well be due to changes in the world climate.”

Rangel warned that looters, who had provoked warning shots from national guardsmen in some areas, would be punished. But in recognition of the despair of victims wandering the streets in search of food and water, authorities supervised the distribution of loads of imported food that had spilled out of shattered cargo containers in the port of La Guaira.

The Health Ministry, meanwhile, called for donations of medicine and ordered all medical personnel to report to health posts organizing a vaccination program intended to prevent typhoid, cholera and other diseases. The relief effort had already received millions of dollars and hundreds of tons of supplies from nations including the United States, Spain, Cuba and China, officials said.

The fearsome destruction made Venezuela’s political strife, which has pitted the populist Chavez against the elite and the business community, seem a distant memory, Rangel said. The foreign minister was referring to an angry election campaign this month that preceded the approval of a new Chavez-backed constitution in an election Wednesday, the same night the deluge began. The aspects of Chavez’s government that have worried some Venezuelans, notably his military experience and reliance on an army that has an unusually positive image with civilians, could benefit the recovery efforts.

“All of the bickering is behind us now,” Rangel said. “Nobody’s talking politics. . . . It’s time to work together.”

Staff writer Rotella reported from Sao Paulo, Brazil, and special correspondent Russell from La Guaira.