Venezuela earthquakes: nearly 600 people now confirmed dead

**Alex Ritson** (0:00)
This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Alex Ritson and at 15 Hours GMT on Friday 26 June, these are our main stories. Nearly 600 people are known to have died in two huge earthquakes which struck Venezuela on Wednesday. Life in prison for a former high-ranking security official in Ukraine for passing secrets to Russia. And Japan is bracing itself for two tropical storms approaching.
Also in this podcast, Egypt and Iran are annoyed that their World Cup match in Seattle coincides with the city's Gay Pride March, but the organisers call for tolerance.

**Heda McLondon** (0:45)
We're excited to have you in Seattle. You are welcome in Seattle.
While you're here, learn about who we are, learn about our culture.

**Alex Ritson** (0:53)
Homosexuality is treated as a crime in both countries.
International rescue teams are arriving in Venezuela to help find survivors trapped under rubble of collapsed buildings after two powerful earthquakes. The president, Delcy Rodriguez, says nearly 600 people are now known to have died. Many more people are feared dead, with others left homeless or too afraid to stay in damaged, unsafe buildings, sleeping in the streets after the disaster. The earthquakes struck on Wednesday evening, a national holiday in Venezuela, which meant more people would have been at home than on a normal weekday. The coastal region of La Guaria, near the capital, Caracas, was the worst hit, and local rescuers there have been hard at work. They pulled this woman, Graciela Mora, out alive from under the rubble.

**Graciela Mora** (1:56)
When the earthquake started, I clung as tightly as I could to the doorframe, so tightly that I broke my finger. I held on tight, really tight to the doorframe, until all the floors collapsed.

**Alex Ritson** (2:08)
Andres Ortiz is a gastroenterologist in Caracas. He talked to the BBC from one of the main hospitals in the city where he's volunteering today.

**Andres Ortiz** (2:18)
Yesterday, the government, they issued some information and they were saying that they had to close down eight hospitals near Caracas and La Guaida, and that they're moving all those patients from those eight hospitals towards the other hospitals in Caracas. So that's overflowing the capacity of all the hospitals in Caracas. On my way to this hospital, I did see a lot of people sleeping on the streets, and a lot of people sleeping in tents near the hospital, and like in parks and green areas around the city, you can see a lot of people sleeping in tents, and not only tents, but provisional tents that the government has set up, I guess.

**Alex Ritson** (3:05)
The acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, said dozens of people had been rescued alive in LaGuardia, but opposition leaders have criticised the government for not doing enough. Freddy Guevara is a former member of the Venezuelan National Assembly, who was imprisoned under President Nicolas Maduro, and is now part of the opposition in exile.

**Freddy Guevara** (3:26)
The official number doesn't make sense at all. We have open crowd sourcing platforms that says that we have around 30,000 people missing. We don't know about the deaths.
It's absolutely horrible. We have entire areas of cities that are on the rubble. You will think that you're looking at Ukraine or Gaza, but it's the cities of Venezuela that are devastated. The situation gets worse because it's not just a natural disaster, the earthquake that can happen to everyone. But it's a country that has the first resources on oil in the world. What you're seeing now, people having to work with their bare hands because firefighters and first responders, no one has tools, there's nothing. That's why everyone is having to send help because the situation is so dire and so desperate that people are dying not because of the earthquake, but because there was no capacity to respond.

**Alex Ritson** (4:24)
For more on the situation, I talk to our America's online editor, Vanessa Buschluter.

**Vanessa Bueschluter** (4:30)
The good news is that some of the international teams have arrived in the worst affected areas. So a team from the Mexican military, a Swiss rescue team and one from El Salvador, all of whom have got very good expertise in trying to salvage people from these situations. They've got drones, they've got highly trained dogs. A civilian team from Mexico known as the Moles Los Topos is also on its way there. They are well known for having the best search dogs and they have saved many lives in the past.

**Alex Ritson** (5:04)
How are hospitals coping?

**Vanessa Bueschluter** (5:06)
Not very well, as Freddy Guevara was saying there in that interview. The hospitals in Venezuela have for many years suffered from underfunding.