Nine days after a double tremor flattened hundreds of buildings along Venezuela’s northern coast, international search teams said they had detected no vital signs from Fabio Bastardo, the nine-year-old boy trapped since 24 June beneath the Taihiti residential tower in Caraballeda. Simultaneously, emergency workers maintained Morse-code contact with Gustavo Romero Matamoros, the police chief of La Guaira state, who is pinned inside the Oasis Beach condominium in Catia La Mar with an estimated 20 other people.

According to Venezuelan authorities, the earthquakes — a 7.5-magnitude shock followed minutes later by a 6.1-magnitude tremor — have killed 2,645 people, injured more than 12,600 and left at least 15,000 displaced. Some 189 buildings collapsed and 885 were damaged, the government said, while more than 3,300 foreign rescuers have joined over 29,000 national personnel in the relief operation. Officials recorded 890 aftershocks.

Rescuers from El Salvador and Argentina used sonar and georadar at the Taihiti site on Friday but found no indication that Fabio remained alive, the Spanish news agency Efe reported. Several regional media outlets subsequently reported the child’s death. Yet his father, a sailor who had been speaking with the family by video call when the building collapsed, told reporters he still felt his son alive in his heart and that relatives had heard whistling and knocking as recently as Friday morning. The grandmother, Rebeca, said the family had been digging with their bare hands before specialist teams arrived, and she claimed the boy had responded to calls on Sunday. Rescuers cautioned that the weakened structure required painstaking shoring, and a military official suggested Fabio was lying next to his mother’s body.

The parallel effort to free Police Chief Romero, trapped inside the Oasis Beach building, gained hope after a local journalist, Aymara Lorenzo, documented the operation on social media. Romero has a crushed hand and limited arm movement but continues to tap messages in Morse code against a wall. His wife, contacted by radio, urged him to hold on. Rescue workers said his strength was ebbing and asked bystanders to keep silent to hear his signals.

The humanitarian response has faced sharp criticism on social media. A young content creator, Paola Lairet, posted a video from the collapsed Caribe complex claiming that 39 people were still alive below but that cranes were unavailable to lift heavy slabs. The CNN correspondent at the scene reported that fuel shortages had immobilised excavators, forcing residents to dig by hand. Interim President Delcy Rodríguez, in her first press conference since the disaster, rejected accusations of delay, stating that 19,000 security and rescue personnel were now deployed. She blamed initial delays on damage to airports and roads and decried attempts to “politicise a humanitarian crisis.” Separately, some local media reported that a volunteer rescue leader known as El Topo disappeared after publicly denouncing the government’s efficiency; no official statement has been issued on his whereabouts. The World Health Organization meanwhile warned of measles and other infectious-disease risks in overcrowded shelters with low vaccination coverage. Rescue operations continue under what officials describe as a provisional and steadily rising death toll.