(Las Tejerías) “We love you princess”, can we read Friday on a still fresh cement tomb. It is that of a three-year-old girl among the hundred victims of the landslide which occurred in Las Tejerias in the center-north of Venezuela.
Posted yesterday at 7:20 p.m.
A United Nations delegation visited the city of 50,000 inhabitants on Friday, devastated on October 8 by mudslides which swept away everything in their path: houses, trees, stones and cars.
“In the immediate future, we have help that we will make available,” Abubacar Sultan, UNICEF representative and head of the delegation that also came to assess the situation and coordinate its action with the authorities, told reporters.
Interior Minister Remigio Ceballos, who announced Thursday that 50 bodies had been “handed over” to their relatives, told AFP on Friday that the authorities maintained the number of missing at 56 for the moment, but that this number could be less.
Meanwhile, clean-up and power restoration work continues in the town, while much of the debris and mud that has piled up there has been removed from the main streets.
However, many residents of Las Tejerias continue to dump mud and water from their homes.
Crews from the electricity and telephone companies are busy while tankers make shuttles to distribute water. Some businesses have even reopened.
And the cemetery from which emanates a putrid smell knows an unusual activity in this small town built on the mountainside. Of the 50 bodies found, 16 were buried, according to cemetery workers.
“It was sad,” says one of them, who asks not to be named, clearing brushwood. “This one belongs to a three-year-old girl who slipped from her mother’s arms when the tragedy happened,” he adds, pointing to the blue-tiled grave where the little girl was buried. buried on Thursday.
A few meters away, a mound of earth topped with a small bouquet of flowers covers the grave of an elderly couple.
Two other burials are planned for this Friday, but it is necessary to wait for the identification of the bodies by forensic medicine.
Raul Borges does not know what to do or who to contact. He found his wife dead in the river and when he went to get the body from the morgue, he was told it had already been delivered… “They say they don’t have it”, explains this man 67 year old with red eyes.
“He was carried away”
Entire areas remain inaccessible.
On Wednesday, military helicopters dropped food parcels.
“It all happened in seconds,” says Jesus Chavez, a 32-year-old survivor. “We managed to jump from roof to roof. People were shouting “Help! Help !” »
“I tried to hand a pipe to a boy (for him to hang on to). But he couldn’t get out of it. The current was too strong. He was swept away”, he continues, ensuring that he still managed to save six people, including a woman who “lost her two babies, including one a few months old”.
The authorities have set up reception centers for those affected who will also be temporarily placed in social housing in other regions of Venezuela.
Sultan, who visited La Tejerias with Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, said UN agencies “provide technical support and all possible elements to contribute”.
He was accompanied by representatives from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) — which has already donated medicines and water purification tablets, the Agency for Refugees (UNHCR), the World Food Program ( WFP) and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
“It is an articulated, coordinated effort […] where everything is going to be very organized so that all these mechanisms that have been established for the recovery of Las Tejerías are reinforced by the United Nations,” said Mr.me Rodríguez.