The End of the World for a Venezuelan Town

The remaining inhabitants of this beach town beneath the mountains know the world will not end on the last day of 1999.

Because in Carmen de Uria, now a virtual ghost town roamed by dogs, looters, soldiers and a few bedraggled survivors, the world ended 11 days ago.

On Dec. 15, doomsday rains brought the mountains crashing down in a fury of water, mud and boulders that hurled cars into second-story windows, buried houses and trees, and obliterated the village square and the coastal highway. Rivers of death tore through Carmen de Uria into the Caribbean, destroying everything and everyone in their paths.

“No one can ever live here again,” Venezuelan army Lt. Nelson Marquez says. “They will just have to dynamite this place. Declare it a cemetery and blow it up.”

Marquez, 26, surveys the post-apocalyptic landscape from a beachfront ruin where he and a dozen other marooned souls are waiting out a tense night of hard rain and clattering landslides, echoes of the horror. His boyish face is illuminated by a lantern assembled from a cannibalized car battery and headlight.

He has a holstered 9-millimeter Sig Sauer pistol strapped to his ribs over his tan uniform to ward off the human predators infesting the disaster zone. But Marquez still looks worried. Now more than ever, the lieutenant believes in ghosts.

“Imagine how many people died here,” Marquez whispers. “Imagine how many bodies are beneath the mud where we walk.”

It is hard to imagine, to calculate, to believe how many people the floods killed in places like Carmen de Uria on the coast north of the Venezuelan capital, Caracas. Some government officials estimate as many as 30,000 people. Marquez and many others--foreign and Venezuelan relief workers, ordinary citizens--believe that the figure is higher. Clearly, the floods were Venezuela’s worst disaster and one of the worst in Latin American history.

Spending a night in this village of the dead makes the statistics a lot more human. A visit to the heart of the disaster zone reveals the anguish, resilience and solidarity of the survivors, thousands of whom are stranded in squalid conditions without electricity, phones, roads or running water, exposed to disease and the elements. They depend on a chaotic swarm of helicopters and grim platoons of soldiers for provisions, transportation and protection against the potential savagery of despair.

Large sections of coastal Vargas state have become a primitive no man’s land where it is hard to imagine that life will ever be normal again.

“This was a beautiful place once,” shouts Oscar Duran above the roar of an air force helicopter soaring over the high-rise skyline of the abandoned Los Corales resort with a load of bottled water, canned food and medicine.

But the beautiful green mountains turned deadly when days of extraordinarily intense rains caused a chain reaction of floods and avalanches.

Seeing, but Still Not Believing

Duran, 32, still cannot believe what he sees. Only a day after he returned to Caracas from two years studying psychiatry in Chicago, he put on the orange vest of a civil defense volunteer and began treating traumatized refugees in the bedlam of a Caracas shelter. Duran is convinced the death toll will keep growing, that the government wants to minimize the extent of the calamity.

“Only in the center where I work, there are 700 people,” he says. “All of them lost at least one relative, and many lost five or six. Multiply from there.”

Duran is on a mission to Carmen de Uria, where one of his friends died. His counseling team has been assigned to find a family holed up in the ruins and try to convince them to leave. The helicopter descends into a cove and touches down on the beach of what was a serene town, neither rich nor poor, favored by retirees and middle-class people willing to make the commute through the mountains to Caracas.

Most of the inhabitants are believed to have died, the aid workers say, their voices growing soft as they slog through mud and sand alongside a rushing brown river that did not exist two weeks ago. Almost all the survivors have left.

Little Left to Salvage

In the silent terraced streets, the aid workers see forlorn dogs sitting in doorways with Christmas trees and nativity scenes visible behind them, the exposed innards of houses whose second floors are caked in mud, the twisted skeleton of a red-roof church where only the wall behind the altar--a life-size crucifix flanked by stained-glass windows--remains intact.

The aid workers fail to find the family they were looking for. But there are several other families still camped out here, determined to defend their homes, living on airlifted supplies and unsure what to do next.

“This was a very close-knit town,” says Wilfrido Pavon, bare-chested and sitting on a bike. “We risked our lives to save each other. We were up on top of rooftops. I had my wife and daughter with me. We could hear the screams everywhere--the panic, the people being swept down into the sea,” the former municipal police officer says.

Marquez is here too, having accompanied a friend who returned home to find that his house had been ransacked. The only way out of the town is by helicopter; as dusk falls, the lieutenant realizes no more helicopters are coming. It is too late and too dangerous to hike an hour back to a road where his friends are waiting with a car.

So Marquez, a similarly marooned civilian aid volunteer named Stalin Cordero and three foreign journalists decide to find shelter for the night in a two-story shell of a building overlooking the roof of a seaside restaurant that barely protrudes from the sand. They are getting organized when they hear people approaching in the darkness.

Marquez immediately draws his gun; earlier in the day, he spotted a rogue military policeman who is reported to be roaming the streets robbing people with a shotgun. He orders the group to identify itself.

“We come in peace,” a voice calls in response. “We just want to bed down here for the night.”

An Incredible Hike From Caracas

The six newcomers are led by Pedro Colmenares, 55, a metalworker whose 28-year-old daughter lived in Carmen de Uria and has been missing since the floods. They have walked all the way from Caracas, an incredible eight hours down the mountain and along the coast, to see if they can find news of her.

“She is a computer programmer. She works for Johnson & Johnson,” Colmenares says with obvious pride. He is a dignified man with a neat beard and glasses. His wife, Marisol, and her sister, Lucilla, are rail thin, with fine, almost Ethiopian-looking features. His sons and nephew are quiet, polite teenagers.

With the kind of immediate solidarity that has occurred all over the disaster zone during the last weeks, the two groups join forces. They set up a little camp on the open-walled first floor, clearing a space amid debris. The Colmenares family produces water and tuna sandwiches from a cooler. One of the sons finds a set of dominoes in an abandoned car. Marquez, whom the others christen Lt. MacGyver, after the resourceful TV character, goes scavenging for blankets.

Then the rain comes, the hardest rain since the floods. The floor turns to slop. The group retreats to the second floor, where a one-armed man is sleeping in a hammock.

Unable to Escape the Rain

The squatters try to get comfortable again on a motley assortment of scavenged car seats, mattresses and chairs with arm-desks that probably came from the nearby school. But the rain gets harder. And around midnight, the landslides begin: ugly explosions of sound, a cracking and rumbling of rock and earth that seems to shake the building.

The mountains are still disintegrating, piece by piece; they are still capable of mayhem. As the sounds increase, everyone grows apprehensive.

“We have to get out of here and find someplace safe,” Marisol exclaims, hunched in a chair, eyes bright with fear and insomnia. “The floods are going to come again. Do you see how the river is growing?”

The laconic Marquez, a veteran of grueling patrols in the wilderness near the Colombian border, points out that there is nowhere to go. He goes back to sleep, his tall frame stretched out on a blanket. Curled up next to him are two kittens and a white, furry little dog that have attached themselves to the lieutenant as if he were St. Francis of Assisi.

Hardly anyone else sleeps. Cordero, who is 30 and has elaborately puffed-up and combed-back hair, does not even try. He talks garrulously about his work as an industrial safety consultant. He explains how his father, an old-school union organizer, named him Stalin out of ideological convictions. He ruminates on the suggestive timing of the catastrophe.

“They say the ends of centuries are always tough--this one sure was,” he says. “My God. Let’s just get through the rest of the year and hope the next one is better.”

Cordero finds a Venezuelan flag somewhere and wraps it around his head like a pirate. He watches the sea like a sentry until the rain abates at daylight; Christmas Eve dawns with storm clouds in the distance.

The morning brings small groups of people walking through the thick vegetation of the coast, saying cautious hellos to one another. Unless you can get a ride on a helicopter or a military boat, transportation here has been reduced to hiking. Marquez’s group decides to follow suit and walk an hour and a half to the nearest military outpost.

Just as they set off, a helicopter descends onto the beach long enough to drop off a team of red-bereted paratroopers. They march into the ruins and reemerge almost immediately leading a dozen suspected looters at gunpoint.

Another helicopter arrives. The Colmenares family comes across a civil defense worker who supposedly has news of their daughter. Marquez, Cordero and the journalists climb aboard the helicopter. Marquez carries the furry little dog from the ruins in his arms.

“If I left him here, he would die of hunger,” the lieutenant explains.

The rain has returned with a vengeance. The pilot is in a hurry. There is no time to say goodbye to the Colmenares family. There is no time to find out if their daughter is dead or alive. As the helicopter leaves below the ghosts of Carmen de Uria, there is no time--and little reason--to wish anyone a merry Christmas.