The doctors thought they were headed out to save lives.
When they arrived at the heart of Venezuela’s disaster zone, they were told they would be searching for the dead.
On Friday, less than 48 hours after two major earthquakes shook Venezuela, Dr. Zaira Medina, 58, gathered a team of doctors and donated supplies and set out for La Guaira, the nearby state on the country’s sparkling coast that had been hardest hit in the disaster.
“I am going to war,” she told the medical staff she was leaving behind. They gathered around her. “Make sure to be loving to the people who come here. If there is a kid, hug the kid.”
Dr. Medina, director of the Pérez de León Hospital in Caracas, didn’t know what to expect. But she had a destination, her home in La Guaira, and a goal: rescue her neighbors.
Portofino Beach was the name of the sand-colored nine-story building. While some residents used it as a vacation spot, for Dr. Medina and several other doctors it was home.
The building’s lower floors had buckled and crumpled in the temblor, leaving neighbors trapped inside and the structure leaning dangerously backward. In some places Portofino Beach was now just a pile of rebar, wall and dust.
Accompanying Dr. Medina on this mission was her daughter Gabriela Herrera, 29, a surgeon.
The team loaded into a half-dozen vehicles. They wore scrubs and sneakers and carried flimsy helmets.
The road to La Guaira was packed with buses, cars, aid trucks and people on motorbikes loaded with water and rudimentary excavation tools like shovels and ropes. It took four hours to get from the hospital to the apartment, a journey that usually takes just one.
Part of the team rode in the bed of a pickup truck. Some, to try to arrive more quickly, trekked partly on foot in the heat. As they entered La Guaira, they passed a crumbling church, its face partly sheared off, exposing its insides, dark like an open mouth.
With so much traffic, Red Cross aid trucks sat paralyzed on the road.
Finally, Dr. Medina arrived at Portofino Beach. A small team from Civil Protection, the national emergency service, was already there going through the rubble.
Germán Ortiz was the head of the Civil Protection team on the ground. A rotting odor surrounded the building — the smell of decomposing bodies.
Speaking quietly, as if trying not to scare survivors who had gathered around, he informed the doctors that his team had heard no voices from inside the building.
Now, they were just trying to recover bodies.
To emphasize his point, he called out: “We are the rescue team! If there is anyone alive here, make some noise!”
Total silence.
He tried again.
Nothing.
The medical team wanted to get into the building anyway. Mr. Ortiz said no — they did not have the right helmets or gear.
Dr. Medina’s group insisted. Someone, she believed, must be alive inside.
Mr. Ortiz relented. The group could work on the building’s periphery, he said, moving away debris, in teams that rotated every 20 minutes to prevent exhaustion.
A yellow excavation machine idled in front of Portofino Beach. It was not used that evening; Dr. Medina said later that she struggled to understand why.
At one point, she turned to the rescuers.
You know, she said, this is my building.
A Civil Protection worker hugged her.
I know, he said. We’re all in this together.
The doctors began to comb through the debris. Then darkness fell. With no large lights available to guide them, the search slowed, and then stopped.
Not ready to quit, the doctors decided to move on, to find somewhere they could be useful.
They loaded into the trucks, scanning for buildings that might have survivors. When traffic stymied them, some got out and began to walk.
On some stretches, they trekked in near total darkness. Then they found a team of Colombian rescue workers and saw movement.
Perhaps someone was alive?
A man with a gun — police? military? they never found out for sure — jumped in to explain. The people moving in the darkness were looters, not survivors in need of help.
Then came a tussle among rescue workers, with some calling for silence so they could hear anyone trapped. Others called out to their colleagues: Three bodies had been spotted in the rubble.
Exhaustion set in. The medical team piled back into their trucks.
It took hours to get home. They rolled into the capital around 4 a.m. During their 12-hour expedition, the doctors had not treated a single patient. All of the people they sought to help were either out of reach or dead.
