The New Indian Express ·
Months after Venezuela earthquakes, a family refuses to give up search for their missing relative
CARACAS: Antonella Molina, her nephew Pedro Molina and a group of friends set out at 8 a.m. on a recent Saturday, hands full of flyers, walking carefully through the rubble that remains throughout La Guaira after two catastrophic back-to-back earthquakes 10 weeks ago.
Their mission is to find 18-year-old Andrés Molina — Antonella's nephew and Pedro's cousin — who they haven't heard from since the double earthquakes hit Venezuela on June 24. Andrés is among tens of thousands who remain missing, according to an independent account, far surpassing the government estimate of 1,500.
Weeks before, Antonella and other relatives pulled the bodies of Andrés' mother and brother from the collapsed remains of their 10-story apartment building that collapsed in La Guaira, the coastal area just north of the capital Caracas that was one of the hardest hit. The building once housed more than 30 people but there was no sign of Andrés, not even the backpack he always carried.