Rescuers race to free security guard trapped 100 hours in Venezuela mall collapse

Rescue workers were only about one metre, or three feet, from Hernán Alberto Gil Flores on Thursday as they cut through unstable concrete and twisted steel in La Guaira, racing to reach the 44-year-old security guard who had spent more than 100 hours buried under the wreckage of a collapsed shopping mall parking lot.

Gil was trapped beneath about 29 feet of debris after twin earthquakes struck Venezuela on June 24, 2026, and rescuers first located him on Saturday. By Wednesday night, they had made visual contact with him using a search camera, a crucial step that let teams keep tracking his position even as parts of the damaged structure continued to collapse during the extraction effort.

The rescue has depended on a delicate mix of medical support and engineering improvisation. Gil received water, food, medication, hydration solutions and intravenous serum while crews worked around the unstable site, trying to keep him alive without triggering another collapse. Rescuers said he was in stable condition, and one described him as cheerful. Another said he was even cheering the teams on and asking for his preferred flavored hydration drinks.

Around 350 rescuers have been working the operation, including teams from Venezuela, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, Portugal and the United States. The effort has unfolded in shifts around the clock, with workers forced to balance speed against the risk that the remaining structure could give way before they reached him.

Gil’s wife, Usbimar Gonzales, called his survival “a miracle” and said she had gone through “days of great sorrow” while their children waited for him at home. Her words captured the human strain of a rescue that has become a test of endurance for both the trapped man and the crews trying to reach him.

The stakes are sharpened by the scale of the earthquake disaster across Venezuela. Almost 2,300 people have been confirmed dead, more than 11,000 injured and almost 13,000 left homeless, while tens of thousands more remain missing or unaccounted for. La Guaira has been among the hardest-hit coastal areas, and Delcy Rodriguez declared seven days of mourning.

Officials and rescue teams said the case was extraordinary because survival chances usually drop sharply after about three days, the so-called golden window for rescue. Gil’s extraction, if completed, would place him among the rare survivors found alive after eight days under rubble, when every hour inside the ruin has made the next one more perilous than the last.