Death Toll From Venezuelan Floods Could Top 20,000

The scope of the tragedy caused by devastating floods in Venezuela became increasingly clear Monday as officials said the rapidly rising death toll could surpass 20,000.

The focus of rescue and relief efforts remained the coastal state of Vargas, an area of shantytowns and beach resorts--north of this capital city--that has been transformed into a landscape of destruction filled with the stench of death. As it became more and more apparent that thousands of people who were initially described as missing have perished, Foreign Minister Jose Vicente Rangel told reporters that the number of the dead far exceeds the approximately 1,500 cadavers that he said were already in overwhelmed morgues.

“Death toll figures, only speculative ones, range from 5,000, 10,000, 20,000,” Rangel said at a news conference Monday. “There are bodies in the sea, bodies buried in the mud, bodies everywhere.”

Further contributing to the wildly varying casualty counts, President Hugo Chavez went on national television late Monday and said that the number of bodies officially counted was 342, though he added, “Obviously the death toll is much higher, but we are trying not to speculate.”

Hard numbers were scarce because of continuing confusion and serious damage to the transportation and communications infrastructure, but U.S. officials are among those who believe that the casualty count will rise sharply.

After a visit to the disaster zone Monday by Marine Gen. Charles E. Wilhelm, commander in chief of the U.S. Southern Command, U.S. officials said that knowledgeable Venezuelan military officials and international aid workers at the airport command post toured by Wilhelm gave estimates that in some cases put the death toll at more than 25,000.

“This is a major disaster,” one U.S. official said. “You have areas where the mud is more than one story deep and the bodies will never be recovered. . . . The areas may just be declared cemeteries.”

A stark indicator of the feared magnitude: The U.S. is working to respond to a Venezuelan request for 10,000 body bags, this official said. Rescue and aid workers for the United Nations, Red Cross and other agencies who are familiar with the hardest-hit communities fear that the final death toll could exceed even some of the worst estimates, another U.S. official said.

Wilhelm did not discuss numbers. But he said he was deeply affected by a three-hour tour during which he met with Venezuela’s defense minister at the international airport and flew over coastal towns that were obliterated by last week’s furious floods and avalanches.

“The devastation is comparable to what I saw in Central America in the wake of Hurricane Mitch,” he told reporters. In contrast to the vast geographic impact of that 1998 storm, Wilhelm said, the damage in Venezuela was confined to a smaller area that was, unfortunately, densely populated.

Wilhelm and U.S. Ambassador John Maisto also discussed the support provided by eight U.S. military helicopters that have flown more than 150 missions in recent days and rescued 1,000 people in the area around La Guaira, a coastal city pounded by the floods.

The U.S. and Venezuelan military helicopters flew back and forth Monday over miles of once-picturesque coastal road that had been washed into the sea. Damaged cargo containers bobbed in the Caribbean off beaches resembling moonscapes. An overturned tourist bus lay on a flood plain. And in sludge-caked streets of beachfront settlements such as Naguiata, about 15 miles from the airport, paramedics and soldiers took care not to step on mounds of mud covering corpses.

Even as they counted the dead, authorities faced the monumental challenge of caring for the living. Among the survivors waiting for help at a makeshift refugee center at Simon Bolivar International Airport was Sylvia Belen, 30, who sat with her two daughters, one 8 months old and the other 6. Last Wednesday, when the killer rains came, Belen happened to be visiting her mother-in-law next door to her own home in the Macuto shantytown. Belen, a widow, and her daughters watched as a roaring mudslide swept away their brick and aluminum house.

“It was just lucky, that’s all,” Belen said. “My neighbors all went down the ravine. Everything there is gone.”

Carrying a garbage bag full of belongings, Belen waited for one of the buses shuttling refugees through the flood-torn hills to Caracas, where the military has set up refugee camps.

Chavez visited refugees Monday and promised to try to have all of the flood survivors, who are estimated at about 150,000, placed in camps around the nation by Christmas Eve.

The president strode into a sports arena in the capital and engaged a crowd of refugees in a combination public dialogue and pep talk. He told them that Vargas state, which had a pre-flood population of about 400,000, has become a giant ghost town, and urged them to accept his offer to relocate them in rural central Venezuela.

“It’s a horrible tragedy,” Chavez told the crowd. “One of the hardest things is to convince people to leave the area, to find a new existence. I can’t force them to go, but I want to convince them to become producers and farmers for the country’s benefit.”

The impoverished refugees clearly admire and trust the populist president; they clamored for him to help them in their hour of need. But they have also spent their lives living on the urban periphery, and they apparently found it hard to imagine moving to the wilderness near the Colombian border to start new lives.

“What am I going to do down there, president?” one refugee called. “I’ll die of hunger.”

Chavez asked for the man’s phone number and promised to call him personally to talk about his vision of the future.

The government has created a $200-million emergency plan to ensure that survivors do not return to the areas where hillside shantytowns became mass graves, according to Juan Jesus Mantilla, the minister of production and commerce. He told reporters that the government will help find flood survivors jobs in agriculture and in small businesses and industries planned for 11 state-owned industrial parks in the Orinoco River region.

In Miami, meanwhile, hundreds of Venezuelans spent another day camped out in the lobby at Miami International Airport, waiting for the airport in Caracas to reopen. All American Airlines flights to Caracas were canceled, and callers were told that reservations would not be accepted for at least three days.

In the meantime, South Florida residents who were moved by the pictures of devastation in coastal Venezuela ferried box loads of supplies to three warehouse drop-off locations in Miami.

But as tons of food, clothing and medical supplies were crated and made ready for shipment, officials reported a shortage of both cargo planes and usable airports in Venezuela at which to land them.

“People are offering money too,” said Peter Fernandez, a counselor with Switchboard of Miami, an agency handling calls. “People are very touched by what they see down there.”

Times staff writer Rotella reported from Sao Paulo, Brazil, and special correspondent Russell from Caracas. Staff writer Mike Clary in Miami contributed to this report.