Every search begins with silence. In the case of Miranda Borges, it started when her messages went unanswered. His relatives, Oscar Marcano, Lady Liz Khan and Rosario González, were in the Oromar building, in Tanaguarena, 45 kilometers north of Caracas, on the Caribbean Sea, when. For hours he called on the phone, wrote messages and checked social networks waiting for confirmation of life. It never arrived.
Before, on June 25, he decided to go to the building on his own to see how they were doing, Borges explains in a phone call. “When we arrived we knew what had happened: the building had collapsed,” he explains.
From that moment, the search stopped being a wait and became a tour of hospitals, shelters, improvised lists, WhatsApp groups and streets busy with neighbors. Without a clear institutional route, the families of the missing have found in the solidarity of the Tanaguarena community and in the citizen organization the main tools to continue searching.
Borges arrived at the building on a motorcycle. The journey to Tanaguarena was. “The entire road was marked by devastation: seeing the amount of ruined buildings, collapsed structures and debris everywhere was the saddest experience I have ever had,” he recalls. Getting to Oromar was an odyssey, but I didn’t consider any other option.
When he reached the street, he saw the magnitude of the disaster: four buildings on the block had collapsed. Oromar and the two buildings next to it no longer existed.
When he confirmed that the structure had collapsed, he called his family. The news sparked an immediate mobilization. They gathered the tools they found in their homes and several cousins traveled to help remove the debris. “All the heavy lifting has depended solely on the physical strength and support of several men in our own family,” he explains.
Since then. Every stone removed implies a risk. The search requires physical resistance, but also the ability to continue advancing while the fear of hundreds of aftershocks a day coexists with the possibility of finding, under the rubble, those they are looking for.
The debris also erased the geography of the building. To find their relatives, they first had to rebuild, piece by piece, the place where they had lived.
The next stage of the search was born from collaboration between strangers. Borges understood that he needed to locate other residents and gather as much information as possible about the Oromar. Through social networks he contacted a neighbor who demanded the presence of rescue teams and, thanks to her, he entered the WhatsApp group of the building’s inhabitants.
From there began a collective reconstruction of the memory of the place. Together they created a map of a building that no longer existed. They compared the position of the debris with the location of windows, stairs, parking lots and apartments. Neighbors exchanged improvised plans, photographs, satellite images and memories about the layout of the homes, stairs and entrances. They were trying to answer an essential question: where those inside could have been trapped and where it was possible to enter.
“It seems that the building tilted, because we found my family’s belongings there,” Borges writes in the WhatsApp group. “If so, from the parking lot we could find space to enter through the basement.” The collectively constructed map allowed them to redefine the search. “Knowing the layout of the building changes everything because with that information we know where to look. What we don’t know is how,” he says.
Reconstructing the building on a map did not mean being able to enter it. Three days after the earthquake, no rescue team had inspected the Oromar. The wait began to have a new and cruel enemy: the smell that came from the rubble. Without the need for words, he announced what many feared and slowly eroded the hope of those who continued searching.
Borges then began a new career: one that would allow this collective map to be converted into a rescue operation.
Through a network of journalists, he obtained a spreadsheet with contacts of people who volunteered heavy machinery. However, the waiting list was weeks long. The only immediate alternative was to hire the service. In the building’s WhatsApp group, a neighbor sent a message: “We already found machinery, but it costs $2,900.” Borges’ family was very far from being able to assume that expense.
The search also moved to phones. While some remained in front of the rubble, others wrote to journalists and volunteers in the hope of finding an alternative to speed up the work. The answers ended up confirming the same reality. “The few pieces of machinery that exist are obtained and paid for by neighbors and relatives,” responded journalist Helena Carpio, who was covering the emergency with a team of rescuers in charge of collecting and centralizing information about the affected buildings.
Meanwhile, the search continued in hospitals, shelters and care centers in Caracas, where relatives searched lists of patients and asked for people who were never registered.
The rescuers arrived at the Oromar building five days after the earthquake, accompanied by a dog trained to locate living people. By then, the uncertainty was beginning to transform into something else. After several days without signs of life or indications that anyone had managed to get out, the first conversations began to arise in the family about the possibility that there were no longer survivors.
Each new search attempt forced us to live with a question that, until then, no one had wanted or been able to ask out loud.
A single instruction: collect the deceased
On the ground floor of the Oromar building, just below the apartment where the Marcano family lived, was the concierge. Francis A. Pérez Tosta lived there. She was rarely alone: she lived with two rescue cats and was frequently visited by her family. She has remained missing since the collapse. His situation, like that of Borges’ three relatives, remains unconfirmed.
Her relative, Jennyfer Toledo, has also made the building a routine. She returns every day with the same contradiction that accompanies so many relatives of the missing: the need to find her, even if finding her means facing the worst news.
The night the rescuers first arrived, one of the relatives wrote in black paint on a wall of the building: “Deceased from being picked up.” Below it he noted the names of the four people believed to remain in the rubble.
The inscription opened a crack between those who were beginning to accept this outcome and those who still resisted doing so. “We can’t confirm that until we find them,” Borges says. “I want to believe that, in some way or another, they were saved.”
Among family members, hope and grief coexist at the same time.
On the fifth day, a second inspection by the rescue teams opened a new access route to the building, following the same route that the neighbors had previously identified in their reconstruction of the Oromar. The entry was made through the basement area, where it was believed that there could be openings to the apartments.
At the bottom of that structure they found a body. It is presumed to be a woman, although her identity has not yet been confirmed. One of the rescuers sent a message, in a quick and tired voice, to the group in the building: “The body was found. I would like to be able to help you more, but this is the only information we have been able to gather.”
The audio quickly circulated among family members and neighbors. The group fell silent, interrupted only by messages of prayer and bewilderment. No one yet knew who to cry for, or if they should.
Shortly after, a new image appeared: a poster with the names of several people presumed dead. It is not known who placed it. His presence once again generated tension between family members. “We haven’t found them yet, and that sign works against us. If it says they are dead, they won’t look for them,” says Borges.
The list included names, surnames, apartment numbers and contacts of relatives printed on a laminated sheet. It was a way of organizing what was left, but it said nothing about what was experienced inside the building: the meetings in the hallways, the celebrations in the pool, the daily gestures during the barbecues.
Nor did it say anything about those who keep coming back every day, convinced that it is not the end yet.
