Search for Dead Goes On in Venezuela

Nearly a week after seeing half his family vanish under an avalanche of mud and boulders, 24-year-old Luciano Holguin watched grimly as soldiers and firemen with pickaxes dug tirelessly for his older brother’s remains.

“I’ve already felt all the pain that I had,” said Holguin, who also lost his younger sister and grandfather in the mudslide that rumbled through Blandin, a mountainside slum in the capital hit by Venezuela’s worst natural disaster this century. “Now I just want the body.”

Government officials said Tuesday that it was impossible to give a precise death toll from the mudslides and flooding that have devastated northern Venezuela. Their estimates range from 5,000 to 30,000. Most bodies are thought to have been buried deep under the avalanches or carried out to sea, and only 1,500 have been recovered, they said.

The number of dead “could be 20,000 or it could be 30,000,” civil defense chief Angel Rangel said.

The disaster started last Wednesday, when torrential rains triggered the massive mudslides and flooding, wiping out entire neighborhoods.

With tens of thousands of survivors already evacuated from the hardest-hit areas, the relief effort began shifting its focus Tuesday to recovering bodies, avoiding epidemics and finding new or temporary homes for 150,000 people.

Teams of soldiers, forensic specialists and search dogs descended on devastated Vargas state, on Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, in a stepped-up effort to find the dead.

An estimated 2,000 survivors remained stranded in remote coastal towns and villages in Vargas, officials said.

Health Minister Gilberto Ochoa warned that cases of diarrhea, dehydration and other health problems could spread because of unsanitary conditions.

President Hugo Chavez urged residents to abandon the disaster area and said officials would block new construction in it.

Meanwhile, sporadic looting broke out Tuesday, and army commander Gen. Lucas Rincon said the military was investigating reports that national guard soldiers participated in some of the previous days’ sacking of stores and shipping containers.