Rescue teams intensified operations across Venezuela on Sunday as the death toll from this week's devastating twin earthquakes climbed to nearly 1,500, while dramatic rescues of survivors trapped beneath collapsed buildings offered rare moments of hope amid a rapidly narrowing window to save lives.
Foreign rescue teams continued searching through mountains of rubble in La Guaira, the hardest-hit coastal state, where dozens of buildings were reduced to debris after the powerful magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 earthquakes struck on Wednesday.
"Rescue and recovery efforts are ongoing. Today (Sunday) we have recovered people alive and, therefore, operations are not being suspended. We always maintain hope," interim President Delcy Rodriguez said after announcing the formation of a presidential commission to determine the habitability of damaged buildings.
Flanked by several ministers, Rodriguez said school classes would remain suspended for another week and electricity supply in La Guaira had been restored to 75%.
The government, headed by Rodriguez since her predecessor was ousted by the United States in a January raid, thanked civilian volunteers ferrying aid to La Guaira but later tightened access to the main road, saying heavy traffic was slowing the movement of emergency vehicles.
Earlier in the day, Jorge Rodriguez, the acting president's brother and president of the National Assembly, said the death toll had risen by 20 to reach 1,450. He said 3,150 people remained injured, 12,721 had been displaced and 774 buildings had collapsed.
"We are in critical hours, in crucial hours to continue rescuing lives and to build camps where those people who have lost their homes, or who cannot return, for whatever reason, to their residences can stay," he said.
Families and volunteers initially carried out rescue efforts with limited heavy equipment before more than 2,600 foreign rescue workers arrived. Hundreds of aftershocks have continued to hamper operations and keep residents on edge.
The government said at least 33 people had been rescued by Saturday evening, including several children, while tens of thousands remained unaccounted for.
Father and son rescued after four days
In one of the most remarkable rescues since the disaster, a father and his son were pulled alive from the rubble of a collapsed building in La Guaira on Sunday, four days after the earthquakes struck.
The rescue took 12 hours as French Civil Security personnel and members of the Fairfax County Urban Search and Rescue Team from Virginia carefully worked through unstable debris using specialised search cameras to reach the trapped pair.
Rescue workers carried the visibly weakened father and son, both wearing oxygen masks, on improvised fabric stretchers through debris-filled streets to waiting ambulances as crowds gathered nearby.
"They are extremely weak, as any patient trapped under rubble for four days would be, so we are doing everything possible to rehydrate them and administer various medications during the extraction process, which is moving very slowly," said a member of the French Civil Security.
The same multinational rescue team had rescued a mother and her nine-month-old baby a day earlier.
Meanwhile, a Colombian rescue team saved an 11-year-old boy, Moises, who had been trapped about three metres beneath the rubble after locating him with a scanner. He was pulled out on a stretcher with a broken arm, while his mother and sister were killed in the disaster.
Mexican rescuers also saved another 11-year-old boy from a collapsed building in the town of Caraballeda, Jorge Rodriguez said in a post on X.
Race against the clock
Despite the successful rescues, emergency teams warned that chances of finding survivors alive diminish sharply after the first 72 hours following a major earthquake.
The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that more than 10,000 deaths are possible from the twin earthquakes, potentially making them among the deadliest disasters in Latin America over the past century.
"There exists a window of roughly three days, 72 hours, where the probability afterwards decreases that you can save people alive," said Sebastian Eugster, leader of the Swiss rescue team.
The 80-member Swiss team located several survivors using eight search dogs but was unable to reach them in time, Eugster said.
Although the government has reported only hundreds of people missing or trapped, an opposition-backed website listed just under 50,000 people as unaccounted for on Sunday, down from about 55,000 a day earlier.
International support grows
The U.S. State Department hailed the rescue of an infant by American rescue crews on Saturday, sharing video footage showing responders carrying the blanket-wrapped child from the rubble.
Pope Leo told worshippers gathered for the Angelus prayer in Rome that he wanted "to express my closeness to the Venezuelan sisters and brothers affected by the recent earthquakes" and expressed gratitude to rescue workers.
A senior U.S. official said a funding package worth hundreds of millions of dollars is expected to be announced within the next day or so, in addition to the $150 million already committed by the Trump administration.
Opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado told media outlets on Sunday she planned to return to Venezuela, where she had been living in hiding following the disputed 2024 presidential election before leaving in December to receive her Nobel Prize.
A White House official told Reuters that her planned return had frustrated senior officials in Washington, who believed it was too soon after the disaster.
Separately, workers at Venezuela's largest refinery, the 645,000-barrel-per-day Amuay refinery, said operations were shut down on Sunday following a major power outage in western Falcon state.