Anger in Venezuela one month on from earthquakes

**Pete Ross** (0:00)
This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Pete Ross and in the early hours of Friday the 24th of July, these are our main stories. One month on from the catastrophic earthquakes in Venezuela, thousands of people remain missing. The US hits trading partners with new tariffs, claiming they failed to properly stop forced labour. American lawmakers push for an AI kill switch after open AI goes rogue.
Also in this podcast, Sri Lanka fights the worst outbreak of dengue fever in a decade and...

**Catherine Ayres** (0:36)
That made me think maybe it is just for fun.

**Pete Ross** (0:41)
Scientists are left puzzled by footage of orcas ramming into sunfish.
We start with a grim milestone in Venezuela. It's been one month now since the double earthquakes. At least 5,000 people are known to have died. And the search continues for the missing. The government insists that it's done everything in its power to help. But families remain angry and have raised questions about the quality of public housing blocks which have collapsed.
The prospect of reconstructing the country's devastated northern coastline is daunting. The World Bank estimates the cost of the quake damage to be around 20 billion dollars. Our correspondent Will Grant has travelled back to the worst affected region of La Guaira.

**Will Grant** (1:33)
Families in Venezuela are still looking for their missing loved ones and still finding them. Delicately and with dignity, the body of an 11-year-old girl is removed from a collapsed public housing block. Her father finally able to grieve now that his desperate month-long search for her has come to an end. If anywhere could be considered ground zero of the twin earthquakes in Venezuela, it's here, the public housing complex in Caraballeda. It is a strange and disturbing sight still. A month on, the child's body has just been brought out and wrapped in plastic sheeting and taken to the morgue. Sitting on the rubble, a member of another search group, Naguina Nandez, weeps quietly. Retrieving the bodies is soul-destroying, he tells me through his face mask. For the rescue teams, the families, the friends, just soul-destroying. Victor Calderon. One man's soul is crushed more than most. The neighbours tell me of Victor Calderon, a fisherman who was at sea when the earthquake struck. He returned to dry land to find 26 members of his immediate family were gone, all in the same social housing block.
The relatives include Victor's two sisters, their children and grandchildren, as well as his stepfather and nine cousins. It's almost too much to fathom, I say. I haven't cried for them yet, he answers stoically. I'll do that after I find the ones that are missing. Victor's daughter and granddaughter survived, but their much reduced family now lives in a tent on a golf course.
In a slickly produced video, the acting president, Delci Rodriguez, gave 200 homes to affected families. A first step, but tens of thousands remain homeless. Critics say the government's social housing was shoddily built and collapsed easily, killing thousands. A point I put to the Public Works Minister, Juan José Ramirez.
This wasn't one, but two almost simultaneous earthquakes, both moving in different directions, he argues. All around us, you can see public and private buildings were brought down. The earthquake didn't discriminate between the two, he adds.
In one of those private buildings, Hernan Gil, a security guard, was trapped in an underground car park for eight days before being pulled alive from the rubble, a moment which briefly raised Venezuela's spirits.
After the euphoria faded, though, other families were left searching the same building for their loved ones alone. Laura Barrios is still there, looking for her brother-in-law. A day earlier, they found her sister-in-law and the children, aged 10 and 3

**Chris Vallance** (4:42)
We didn't have children to celebrate.

**Will Grant** (4:48)
It was just the day of the child, but we had no children to celebrate, Laura Sobs. What more can we say that this rubble doesn't already tell us, she asks. Lost t-shirts and sets of cutlery, entire lives gone in just 39 seconds.
When the earthquake struck, the stretch of beach at Playa Pirata was full of visitors for a public holiday. They watched in horror as their homes collapsed in front of them and ran towards their apartments to try to save relatives and pets trapped inside. It's just one of a thousand stories along this northern coastline, in a month that Venezuelans still struggle to comprehend, and which has forever scarred a nation ill-equipped to cope.

**Pete Ross** (5:39)
Will Grant reporting from Venezuela.
President Trump's global trade war continues. Just as a temporary 10% tariff on foreign goods entering the United States expires, he's imposing new ones of between 10% to 12.5%.