Her WhatsApp video to her mother was quick and casual: a clip showing her dinner plate with pasta and chicken, her face and a thumbs-up sign. It was an anodyne update between a mother who had migrated to Brazil and her 16-year-old daughter in Venezuela — part of a daily deluge of voice notes, photos of manicures and selfies of braced-teeth smiles, stickers, and summer holiday plans.
But after the video, sent at 5.30 p.m. on June 24, the girl, Angelina, stopped texting.
At midnight, after her mother, Liliana Figueroa, heard that earthquakes had hit her daughter’s town, she texted again.
“Mommy’s baby,” she wrote to Angelina at 12:37 a.m. “Where are you, my beautiful daughter?”
“Honey,” she wrote at 12.38 a.m.
“Honey,” again, at 1.18 a.m.
“Honey,” again, at 4.27 a.m.
All her messages went undelivered. The body of Angelina, a bubbly, extroverted girl, was found in the rubble of a residential tower in La Guaira.
When the news reached Ms. Figueroa, she was thousands of miles away. Like nearly eight million Venezuelans, she had left a broken economy to build a livelihood abroad and support her daughter.
Mass migration defines modern Venezuela — and it heavily marked this disaster, too.
The earthquakes, which have killed more than 4,800 people, ravaged the northern Venezuelan coastal state of La Guaira, a place where virtually every family has a member abroad.
Migration saved many Venezuelans who survived simply because they were living abroad. But it also made their grief harder.
Some, like Ms. Figueroa, made long, grueling trips home, turning a much-awaited homecoming — a sacred milestone in a migrant’s life — into trauma. Others could not return. They either did not have the money to make the trip or lacked legal status in the countries where they lived and could not risk travel across borders.
Children lost parents they hadn’t seen in years, layering fresh grief over years of longing. Parents like Ms. Figueroa mourned children whom they had mostly seen through a phone screen, leaving them grasping at an absence that was palpable, but also untouchable.
“Migration is hard, but at least you have the video calls,” Ms. Figueroa said as she stood in front of the morgue in La Guaira where she was looking for her daughter’s body. “But there are no video calls to the sky.”
Ms. Figueroa still writes to Angelina, her only child, almost every day.
A Grim Homecoming
Years of economic decay have fueled one of the largest displacement crises in decades, scattering millions of Venezuelans across the globe and creating a sprawling network of long-distance relationships, phone calls and monthly remittances that extends thousands of miles from Venezuela.
So when the earthquakes struck, their impact rippled instantly across oceans and borders, striking families from Miami and Madrid to Bogotá and São Paulo.
Many migrants rushed onto planes, buses and cars for journeys meant to find their families that often turned, somewhere along the way, into trips to mourn them.
Jhon Jairo Portal Pino, a Venezuelan who works as a security guard on ships in Lima, Peru, sold his iPhone and his motorbike to buy a bus ticket to Caracas when he heard his daughter Francheska, 19, was trapped in a collapsed building.
“I wanted to be Superman and fly here and find my daughter,” Mr. Portal Pino, 45, said.
Instead, the journey took him six days. Like many others, he car pooled with fellow migrants who had also lost someone — sharing a long, quiet ride. Once he arrived, he said he dug in the rubble for over a week before finding his daughter’s body.
Along La Guaira’s hard-hit coastline, a bleak repatriation was taking place. Migrants who had come back were sifting through their collapsed childhood homes looking for their parents’ bodies, inspecting remains at morgues, or carrying their relatives’ ashes.
“I had wanted to come back,” said Rafael Alberto Gómez Muñoz, 44, who returned from Colombia and was now holding a wooden box containing the ashes of his sister, Mariangela Gómez, 39, outside a crematory in La Guaira. “But not like this.” He had not seen her for 10 years when she died, trapped in her collapsed apartment with their mother, who also died.
Moisés Leonel Pérez Negrete, 26, a graphic designer, said that over eight years living in Bogotá, Colombia, he had constantly missed home. He missed the sting of hot sand under his bare feet as he walked from his apartment in the tall tower blocks of La Guaira to the beach. He missed his mother, his grandmother’s cooking and drinking beer with his friends.
“I wanted to be eating empanadas with mom,” he said as he sat by the rubble where his mother had been trapped for two weeks. Instead, “I got used to eating a few meters away from the corpses.”
Sacrifice and Guilt
Mr. Pérez Negrete said that a month ago his mother told him she wanted to join him in Colombia. He was excited, but asked her to wait until he could rent a bigger apartment where she could also stay.
“If I had just told her ‘Come here’ right away, she would have come. She’d be here with me now,” he said.
The earthquakes shattered the fragile balance many migrants carry between sacrifice and guilt over having left loved ones behind.
“I wish I had a time machine to return here,” said Ms. Figueroa, Angelina’s mother, “so I would have gone with her.” The girl lived with her father, who was separated from her mother and was also killed.
By the time Ms. Figueroa made it to the morgue, the authorities told her that the rain had washed away the identification number drawn on Angelina’s chest, and they could no longer locate her body among the hundreds being stored there.
With most of the girl’s relatives killed by the quakes and her mother abroad, “There was nobody to look for the body,” Ms. Figueroa said.
She only found a few of her daughter’s belongings in the wreckage: her favorite shorts, her coconut-scented body lotion, her notebook. And then there were the selfies and the voice notes, which were not just memories but the actual substance of the last years of their relationship.
When a coroner showed her a photo of a corpse’s hand for identification, she was able to compare it to a WhatsApp photo Angelina had sent just days before, showcasing her new manicure. She used her smiling photos to help the authorities also identify her body through her braces.
The photo of the suitcase Ms. Figueroa had bought for a trip around Venezuela she was planning with Angelina, and the screenshots of the money transfers that she sent her daughter every month became the bitter evidence of everything she had been striving for.
“What am I going to do now, if everything I did was for her?” she asked.
No return
For many migrants, losing the reason they endured an often punishing life abroad has been disorienting. But at the same time, they also lost their reason to return.
After the U.S. military captured Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president, in January, many migrants hoped they could go back home. But just as the earthquakes dealt a severe blow to Venezuela’s economy, they also tanked many families’ plans to return.
“I don’t want to come back to Venezuela ever again,” Mr. Portal Pino said as he sat on the rubble that had buried his daughter.
After receiving his daughter’s ashes, he said he was going to take them with him to Peru. “I want her to be there with me,” he said.
Other migrants could not even go back to claim their dead. Venezuelans in the United States who do not have legal status or cannot afford the trip grappled with the news from afar.
Vanessa Roque, 31, a Venezuelan migrant in Virginia, said she lost both her parents and a sister in the quakes. Because of her undocumented status, she did not want to take any chances by traveling.
“I could not see them hug them or touch them,” Ms. Roque said, adding that she followed their burials on her phone. “All I could do was watch dirt being thrown over their bodies.”
Mass migration combined with tightening border policies meant that many migrants were forced to try to help rescue their families or recover their bodies remotely. They sent cash and photos for identification and tried to arrange the delivery of the ashes abroad.
But mourning them from afar left them trapped in a numbing haze.
“Everything is frozen, as if it was a dream,” Ms. Roque said.
She had not seen her family since she left Venezuela in 2019. “I never saw them again,” she said. “And I never will.”
Patricia Sulbarán contributed reporting from New York, and María Victoria Fermín from Caracas.
