Eight days after two earthquakes devastated Venezuela, rescuers on Thursday pulled a 44-year-old man alive from the rubble of a collapsed basement, providing a rare moment of hope after a week of desperation.
His name was Hernán Gil, and his rescue came as both the death toll and criticism of the government’s response to the disaster mounted in a country whose institutions have been decimated by years of economic crisis. The toll reached 2,295 on Wednesday, according to the Venezuelan government, and is expected to rise.
Over several days, the attempt to rescue Mr. Gil from the ruins of La Guaira state, perhaps the hardest-hit area of the country, had captivated Venezuelans. As rescuers kept him alive by giving him water and other fluids through a tube, international journalists looked on, among them a photographer working for The New York Times. The President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, chronicled the effort on X.
The operation was led by a Chilean search-and-rescue team, which said that Mr. Gil had been rescued after more than 70 hours of work.
The rescuers established contact with him on Monday morning using radar, sonar and acoustic detection equipment. They confirmed his location visually 12 hours later using a search camera, determining that he was trapped beneath the second basement level of the building.
They were also able to speak to him.
“Move your hand again, just like you were doing,” one rescuer directed Mr. Gil as the camera showed his fingers reaching out of the rubble. “Very good, Hernán. Perfect.”
For days they tunneled toward him, repeatedly stopping to stabilize the structure as debris fell.
Mr. Gil’s wife, Gusbimar González, told a Spanish news media outlet, EFE, that it was a “miracle.” Earlier, she had been warned that there was no hope of finding him alive, she said.
Mr. Gil worked as a security guard at the building, a little more than two miles from the country’s main international airport. He was trapped in a booth when the basement, which is topped by shops and residential apartments, collapsed around him, said Trey Espy, who headed a search-and-rescue crew from the Los Angeles County Fire Department that traveled to Venezuela following the disaster.
After the Chilean rescuers discovered him on Monday, they called in the Los Angeles team for help, along with rescuers from Virginia and Florida. Rescuers from Mexico, El Salvador and Portugal also offered aid.
Mr. Espy said that the huge amount of wreckage complicated the rescue.
“One wrong move, one thing moved the wrong way, and all that debris would have fallen down on him and killed him,” Mr. Espy said. “And if there was another aftershock, the rest of the building could have come down — and all of our rescuers were there.”
He said, “We got to the point where it was moving just one rock at a time to make sure we didn’t pull out the wrong rock and bring the whole thing down on top of him.”
By Wednesday night, Mr. Espy said, after days of chipping away at the mountain of debris with shovels, pack axes and their bare hands, the team members knew they were close. Chilean rescuers monitored Mr. Gil, passing him safety goggles to protect him from falling particles as he looked at the camera with a bloodshot eye.
They finally got him out around 9 a.m.
“The reaction of the team was joyous,” Mr. Espy said. “He was exhausted. The doctors just immediately went in and started treating him.”
Before he was pulled out, Mr. Gil did not appear convinced that he could be saved.
“When we found him, he asked us not to tell his wife that he was alive, just in case he wouldn’t make it,” a rescuer with the Costa Rican Red Cross, Minyar Collado, told The Associated Press.
Mr. Gil is now in a hospital in stable condition, Mr. Espy said.
A co-worker at the building, José Rivero, said he believed Mr. Gil survived because of nearby water tanks that protected him from the pancaked building, giving him space to move.
He was praying for his colleague to make it out alive.
“He is a good co-worker,” Mr. Rivero said. “He likes to help out with everything. He has a family, he has children. They are waiting for him.”
Mr. Gil’s brother, Gunther Gil, who lives in Chile, wiped tears from his eyes on a Chilean television program as he described learning that his brother had survived.
“It was tremendous anguish,” he said. “But it had a happy ending.”
Sheyla Urdaneta and Adriana Loureiro Fernandez contributed reporting.
