Construction worker Anderson Daniel Salcedo, 22, had been detained in the United States for three months before leaving on a repatriation flight last Wednesday and landing in Venezuela just hours prior to a catastrophic pair of earthquakes that struck coastal La Guaira state.
Salcedo, who had lived in the U.S. for more than three years and regularly sent money home to help his mother build a house, was among more than 140 returning migrants - including seven children - who were directed to the government-operated Hotel Santuario La Llanada, a hilltop property with a view of the Caribbean, to await processing after arriving at Maiquetia airport near Caracas.
Shortly after the migrants were housed there, Venezuela experienced its strongest quakes in more than a century. The tremors caused the hotel to collapse and, according to relatives of those accommodated there, likely killed many of the deportees present. Salcedo survived but sustained injuries described by his family as life-changing.
Confusion over custody of phones and identity documents
Relatives of those who were returned have raised questions about why the deportees were taken to the hilltop hotel and why officials held their phones and identity cards. Family members say the withholding of personal devices and documents impeded communication and delayed efforts to locate loved ones amid the chaos following the quakes.
The government program that receives returning migrants, named the Return to the Homeland Grand Mission, did not immediately respond to requests for information about the decisions that led to lodging deportees at the Santuario La Llanada site or about the retention of their personal effects.
On its X account, the Grand Mission posted what it described as condolences and contact information for families three days after the quakes. The post included the lines: "We express our deepest sorrow and solidarity over the tragic loss of life caused by the recent earthquakes," and, "Today we embrace each other in grief, but tomorrow we will rise stronger. We are a people of light, resilience, and hope; together, step by step, we will overcome this trial and find our way home again. You are not alone." The account also provided phone numbers it said families should contact.
Scale of destruction and missing people
Venezuelan authorities say the quakes killed at least 1,750 people nationwide, damaged or flattened more than 850 buildings, injured thousands and left roughly 16,000 people homeless. A website promoted by the country’s political opposition lists about 45,000 people as still missing.
Satellite imagery supplied by Vantor shows a large portion of the hotel reduced to a heap of concrete and rebar, with terracotta roof tiles scattered among the ruins. A section of the building, however, remained standing.
Two families of those on the repatriation flight, who connected with other relatives via social media and shared missing-person posters, said 12 people managed to escape the rubble on their own. One family said it had been shown a list from the Grand Mission naming 32 survivors from the flight.
Salcedo's rescue and medical condition
Salcedo was pulled from the wreckage roughly 40 hours after the earthquakes, his grandmother, Marlene Lozano, said by phone from Nueva Bolivia in Merida, some 700 km from La Guaira. Video circulating among families shows him being hauled from a hole in the debris by several men. In that footage his face appears contorted in pain while one rescuer says, "we’ll pull him right now." Lozano said she does not know who filmed the clip.
The family said the domestic intelligence service, SEBIN, had earlier taken Salcedo's phone and identity card. The Communications Ministry, which handles requests for comment, did not reply to an email seeking information.
Lozano said the absence of an identity document and a phone meant authorities and family could not account for him while he was trapped. "He spent 40 hours in that hole, he didn’t have an ID, they couldn’t account for him because he had no documents," she said. "We had no way to communicate with him and didn’t know anything."
A relative later located Salcedo at Caracas' University Hospital and alerted his aunt. His mother traveled to the capital by motorcycle with her husband. By the time she reached the hospital, doctors had amputated his legs, Lozano said, explaining that he had large amounts of debris weighing down his limbs. The family reported that Salcedo is intubated and that a physician told them the injuries to his legs were aggravated by the way he was moved when pulled from the rubble.
Lozano said the family has not received official updates and that when she visited her local SEBIN office she was told they had no information to provide.
Other families struggle for information and recovery
A similar search for answers has unfolded for Oswadeliz Nunez, an industrial engineer and lawyer, who has encountered difficulty in obtaining official information about her son, Daniel Nunez, 28, who arrived on the same repatriation flight as Salcedo.
According to Nunez, her son borrowed a phone after landing and told her he was being taken to a hotel and would be released the following day. Grateful for that brief contact, she said, because otherwise she would not have heard from him again.
On Thursday Nunez traveled to La Guaira from El Tigre in Anzoategui state, a journey of about 470 km southeast of Caracas, and was told by a SEBIN official that her son had been taken away in an ambulance. She said she was unable to find him at any medical clinic or hospital and was later shown an official list in which his name appears as missing.
Nunez said SEBIN personnel worked in the wreckage without protective equipment, digging with their bare hands, and that heavy machinery did not arrive at the site until Monday. She appealed to the international community to assist in recovering bodies, saying she cannot wait a month or two for the government to remove remains if her son is among those killed.
"If my son had been allowed to head home immediately, he would be alive," Nunez said, adding that the deportees had committed no crime and had already been returned to their country.
Ongoing uncertainties
Families of the deportees and other relatives of those who were at the Santuario La Llanada have repeatedly emphasized the lack of clear, centralized information about survivors and the dead. The apparent withholding of phones and identity documents by security services, delays in heavy equipment reaching the collapse site and limited public information from the agency tasked with processing returnees have all compounded the difficulty of confirming who remains unaccounted for.
Satellite imagery and on-the-ground accounts offer a partial picture of the damage at the hotel, but relatives say they still have not received comprehensive lists or formal notifications that would help them identify loved ones. The scale of destruction reported across the state and the country has left thousands injured and homeless and produced a high official death toll; a politically affiliated website places the number of missing far higher.
Relatives continue to coordinate through social media and community networks, sharing missing-person posters and pooling information as they press authorities for clearer answers about custody of personal effects, the status of survivors and the recovery of bodies.
With hospitals treating the injured and families pressing for identification of the dead, the collapse of the Santuario La Llanada has become a focal point for wider questions about the logistics and oversight of repatriation operations and emergency response in the aftermath of a disaster that has produced extensive human and structural losses.