Messages on WhatsApp arrive so quickly that, by the time you finish reading one, at least 12 others have already beeped.
“Has anyone seen this man? He’s my grandfather. His name is Francisco. He lived at Residencias Caribe. We haven’t heard from him since Wednesday.”
“Can someone send the latest list of missing persons from Residencias Vista Mar in Playa Grande? I’m looking for my godmother. I need information about this building.”
The group, numbering more than 900 people, is one of dozens that emerged after two large-magnitude earthquakes devastated Venezuela’s Caribbean coast on June 24.
With authorities releasing only limited information about victims, survivors and rescue operations, family members across Venezuela and the diaspora have turned to WhatsApp as an impromptu emergency response network. The groups have become unofficial registers of the missing, in which volunteers gather hospital entries, verify reports of more than 2,000 damaged or destroyed buildings, identify victims and relay the location of tens of thousands of missing people who are believed to be trapped under the rubble.
“There is a deafening void of information on the part of the government, and these networks are filling this space,” said Carlos Delgado, communications researcher at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello. “These WhatsApp groups arise out of pure necessity, but also because of people’s willingness to collaborate.”
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One photo after another shows people of all ages, couples, grandparents caring for grandchildren after years of exodus in Venezuela separated families, and elderly people living alone. The images are accompanied by handwritten lists of hospital patients, voice messages sent from rescue sites and, increasingly, explicit videos. Although some members reject the stronger images, others say they allowed them to identify relatives they had been searching for for days.
For Jeffrey Ramos, a Venezuelan living in Chile, the groups have become a full-time mission.
“I joined the group because my sister-in-law’s manicurist here in Chile was looking for her mother and three children,” said Ramos. Working with other volunteers, he helped to reconstruct what had happened to the family, until confirming that the four died in the collapse of Residencias Caribe, a residential building on the coast.
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Since then, Ramos estimates he has helped identify at least 10 victims.
“My wife says, ‘That’s enough, you’re going to have a heart attack,’” he said. “But I can’t stop. I have no peace or mind for anything else.”
Ramos, one of the approximately 8 million Venezuelans living abroad, was also able to help reunite a child from his hometown of Maturín with his father, after reaching out to contacts in his network.
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Other participants publish directly from the most affected areas of the state of La Guaira, sharing information in real time.
For distressed families waiting for news, each notification carries the possibility of hope — or tragedy. The death toll now exceeds 1,450, according to government data.
“In the search for information, I joined different WhatsApp groups because I have friends who were missing in La Guaira. Unfortunately, three of them have already been found dead,” said Hazel González, who lives in San Diego, in the state of Carabobo, a two-hour drive from Caracas and three hours from La Guaira.
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“I try to organize the information and send what has already been verified. I even managed to reunite a child with his family, because I knew where he was from,” he said. “I marked my relatives from that region and we were soon able to locate her grandmother.”
Another Venezuelan, Gaby Gil, in Caracas, said that WhatsApp helped increase calls for help.
“In the end, it becomes a chain of favors. In the group, we keep each other company and help each other”, said Gil, who is still looking for the father and aunt of a close friend in the La Lucha neighborhood, in Catia La Mar, where, according to her, the rescue teams have not yet arrived.
Frustration in the air
Participants in the chat groups frequently express frustration with what they see as a disorganized response from the government of interim President Delcy Rodríguez.
So far, the government has been holding press conferences every few hours, updating the number of victims. On Sunday, he announced the creation of a website to monitor missing people — in parallel to another run by the political opposition — and a telephone line for Venezuelans seeking psychological support.
For now, González says the catastrophe is worse than official reports suggest. “What the government is saying is not even a quarter of the truth,” he said.
Social media is “a fantastic way to align volunteer efforts during an emergency. However, these groups are not as effective at organizing the response itself,” Delgado said. “This requires leadership — something that is missing right now.”
Venezuela’s Ministry of Information, which centralizes press demands, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a speech on Sunday, Rodríguez thanked the local and international rescue teams, firefighters, military personnel and others involved in the operation, promising to maintain efforts in the affected areas, especially in La Guaira.
In the United States, where many Venezuelans have settled, Paula Onorato, 50, tries to find her niece and several of her nephew’s friends. The information circulating on WhatsApp is not always accurate, but it is a starting point, she said.
“Unfortunately, there is no official information, and this leaves us all desperate,” he said. “For this reason, the capacity for improvisation that Venezuelans are showing in this attempt to help is truly admirable.”
