Venezuela quake death toll rises to 3,535, thousands homeless

The death toll from Venezuela’s twin earthquakes climbed to 3,535 as authorities said 16,740 people were injured and 17,854 were left without housing after the June 24 shocks, which measured magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 and hit within seconds of each other. Nearly 18,000 people were still homeless more than a week later, and 12,800 were being housed in 80 shelters across Caracas and La Guaira, the coastal area hit hardest by the disaster.

The immediate crisis has moved well beyond search and rescue. In La Guaira, workers were preparing graves while trucks and forensic teams moved coffins through a cemetery marked by white crosses, a grim sign of how quickly the emergency has turned into a mass burial operation. That burial scene now sits alongside the harder arithmetic of recovery: tens of thousands without stable shelter, damaged infrastructure across the capital region, and a shelter system already stretched by the size of the displaced population.

Public health workers are warning that the second wave of damage may come from the shelters themselves. Mauricio Cerpa Calderon, an adviser to the Emergency Operations Center of the Pan American Health Organization in Washington, said temporary camps are vulnerable to overcrowding, limited ventilation, interrupted access to safe drinking water, water and sanitation problems, and poor handling of food and waste. He said immediate priorities include respiratory infections, diarrhea, skin diseases, wound infections, dengue, and vaccine-preventable illnesses including tetanus, measles, rubella, diphtheria, pertussis and polio.

Political friction over the response has sharpened as families remain uprooted. Acting President Delcy Rodriguez has defended the government’s handling of the disaster, said security forces were deployed immediately after the quakes, and announced a new military unit for future emergencies. Humanitarian groups, including the International Rescue Committee, have criticized the response as inadequate, a dispute that matters because the speed of aid delivery will determine whether displaced families can be kept in Caracas and La Guaira or are forced into longer moves across an already strained region.

Washington has moved to keep humanitarian channels open. The U.S. chargé d’affaires in Caracas, John Barrett, said assistance from the United States now exceeds $310 million and described Venezuela as “fully compliant” with requests to advance the relief effort, while U.S. military cargo aircraft have already been used to move search-and-rescue teams and other support into the country. For a disaster that has left nearly 18,000 people without housing, the measure of success is no longer the casualty count alone but whether aid can reach shelters, cemeteries and damaged neighborhoods fast enough to prevent the quake from becoming a longer regional displacement crisis.