In the first days after the calamitous earthquakes in Venezuela, rescuers and volunteers clawed through collapsed buildings searching for signs of life.
Now, as hopes of finding more survivors fades, the authorities are confronting a different challenge: recovering, identifying and burying thousands of victims in a country whose institutions had already been weakened by years of economic collapse and government mismanagement.
The sudden influx of bodies has quickly overwhelmed the country’s forensic system, leading officials to transform a seaport into a temporary morgue, move victims into refrigerated shipping containers and prepare for the possibility of mass burials.
The Venezuelan government on Tuesday raised the official death toll to 1,943, with 10,710 injured and 75,866 displaced. Forensic workers and aid officials say the true number is likely far higher.
Two doctors at Caracas’ main morgue estimated the true number of dead was closer to 4,000. Anticipating the toll could rise further, the United Nations is procuring 10,000 body bags in coordination with the Venezuelan government, said Gianluca Rampolla del Tindaro, the U.N. resident coordinator in Venezuela.
The flood of bodies quickly exceeded the capacity of morgues in La Guaira, the state hardest hit by the earthquake.
During the first two days after the disaster dozens of bodies lay on cardboard in a La Guaira hospital parking lot in the tropical heat, according to Gerson Hernández, a pastor there. Relatives lined up in vehicles to drop off bodies.
By Saturday the authorities had started moving the bodies from the hospital to the cargo yard of a local port so the national forensic agency could work in a centralized zone, according to two forensic pathologists from the agency who asked not to be identified to because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
Under large tents the doctors perform autopsies required by law before bodies can be buried or cremated. Investigators from Venezuela’s judicial police photograph victims, recover fingerprints and help identify the dead.
Outside the port on Monday, trucks continued delivering coffins. From beyond the security perimeter, rows of bodies could be seen laid side by side on the ground.
The authorities have also begun using refrigerated shipping containers — normally reserved for transporting meat and other perishables — to preserve bodies as they await identification, according to police officers guarding the site and a local shipping executive familiar with the operation.
For relatives looking for missing family members the searches can be harrowing.
For five days Daniely Pastora Hurtado Suárez, 32, said searched for her husband, going from hospital to hospital and eventually to the makeshift morgue at the port in La Guaira filled with the stench of death where the bodies were so disfigured that she almost took the wrong body home.
José Rincón said he spent three days walking among decomposing bodies spread across the ground of the port, manually unzipping body bags bursting with maggots to look for his grandson. Four refrigerated containers held additional victims.
“I checked 100 bodies,” he said. “They’re all just thrown down there indiscriminately.”
The challenge facing forensic workers is immense.
Two forensic doctors at a state-run morgue in Caracas on Sunday said they were receiving between 40 to 80 bodies a day, including victims pulled alive from collapsed buildings who later died in hospitals and bodies brought from La Guaira by relatives.
As of Sunday, 150 bodies remained at the morgue, including 130 that had not yet been identified. Officials in La Guaira had been processing about 750 bodies a day, the doctors said, with about 50 forensic workers commuting from Caracas every day.
Doctors said many victims were so badly crushed beneath collapsed buildings that visual identification had become impossible. Specialists have relied on fingerprint recovery techniques while relatives searched for tattoos, moles, hairstyles and manicures.
While several relatives on Monday waiting outside the port said the identification process had become faster and more organized, the growing number of dead has led to difficult decisions about how bodies should be handled. Some family members said they had been quoted prices for cremations between $400 and $850 — prohibitively expensive for most Venezuelans.
Doctors at the Caracas morgue said the government had offered free cremations to families and that mass graves remain an option for the authorities if fatalities continue to mount.
But the Venezuelan Society of Infectious Diseases urged the authorities not to resort to mass burials, saying they should be avoided to prevent infectious disease outbreaks, complicate identification and prolong anguish for families.
Ms. Hurtado found her husband’s body after a five day search. She said authorities were cremating some unclaimed bodies because of the overwhelming number of victims.
Fearing she would lose the chance to recover his remains, she borrowed $850 to pay a private funeral home to cremate him, saying she wanted to keep his ashes.
“As a family member you want to have something of your loved one,” she said. “Somewhere to go, to cry, to bring flowers. It’s the very least anyone deserves.”
Frances Robles and Julie Turkewitz contributed reporting.
