As Venezuelan morgues fill and the death toll slowly rises, questions remain about how many are truly gone

By Max Saltman, Isa Soares, Madalena Araujo, Avery Schmitz, Gonzalo Zegarra, CNN

Caracas (CNN) — A week after the deadly twin earthquakes in Venezuela, the official death count still strikes both Venezuelans and outside observers as remarkably low. Venezuelan authorities said Wednesday at least 2,295 people were killed in the earthquakes, an increase of around 300 from the previous day’s update.

One forensic pathologist, who asked to remain anonymous due to her fear of retaliation, told CNN she believes the government death toll to be a vast undercount, amounting to “not even a third of what is actually there.”

The pathologist said the makeshift morgue where she works in the port city of La Guaira, an area badly impacted by the quakes, is processing around 400 bodies a day, many of them battered beyond recognition or in advanced states of decay. There’s no more room in the refrigerated trucks, forcing them to place body bags outside in the sun, where they decompose quickly.

She is not alone in her skepticism. Opposition politicians like María Corina Machado have accused the government of downplaying the level of destruction. Venezuelans abroad have constructed unofficial avenues to report missing people, as the government has not yet provided an official figure.

There are still many people unseen beneath the rubble of the collapsed high-rise buildings, and it may take some time for a full picture of the casualties to emerge. CNN has reached out to the Venezuelan government to ask how it conducts its count and for estimates on how many people are considered missing in the aftermath of the earthquakes.

“La Guaira is indescribable,” said the pathologist. “There are so many cases, so many families. (The earthquakes) hit the lower-income families the hardest – they are the most affected.”

Many of these families bring corpses of family members whom they’ve dug from the wreckage themselves.

“They themselves bring their own dead, because civil protection, the firefighters, even the emergency services cannot keep up with rescuing those bodies,” she said.

Initial estimates from the US Geological Survey said that there is a high chance that tens of thousands of people died in the back-to-back 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes. The Venezuelan government, beyond its daily death toll updates, has not provided an estimate of its own for the final number of deceased.

“We are definitely looking at a number higher than the one already reported,” Gianluca Rampolla del Tindaro, the United Nations’ coordinator for Venezuela, said at a Tuesday press conference.

‘An information war’

Critics see the official number as evidence that the Venezuelan government is trying to purposefully undercount earthquake deaths. Suspicion around death tolls isn’t without precedent: after major landslides and flooding in La Guaira in 1999, the government of Venezuela’s late President Hugo Chávez never produced an official death toll at all.

Machado said in an Instagram video from exile on Monday that authorities are trying to obscure information about the scale of destruction, accusing the government of blocking communications. CNN has reached out to the Venezuelan government for comment.

On Sunday, human rights organization Provea said that the “official earthquake figures raise more doubts than they provide answers.”

“We need zero opacity in the response to this national tragedy,” the NGO added.

But David Smilde, a sociologist at Tulane University and Venezuela expert, is unconvinced that the government would purposefully misstate or downplay figures when the tragedy’s magnitude has brought in so much aid.

“We’re going to need more studies and more actual research and understanding to really know before speculating that the government is withholding a number of deaths,” Smilde told CNN. “I’m not entirely sure that the government has a huge motivation to reduce the number of dead when they can also use that (number) to try and get more foreign aid.”

Smilde also noted a few key differences between the situation in La Guaira today and in the landslides of 1999. Back then, the flooding was so intense that some bodies were washed out to sea and found as far away as Curaçao. Others “were just covered over, never dug out. And so there was no real list that could be then confirmed about how many people had gone missing.”

“With Venezuela,” Smilde warns, “There’s such a premium on trying to politicize. Basically everything that happens in Venezuela is going to be used by one side or the other for the purposes of local power. So it goes for the government, and so it goes for the opposition.”

Sociologist Rafael Uzcátegui, director of the think tank Laboratorio de Paz, said that the Venezuelan government is beset with inefficiency and political cronyism, making it difficult to deliver accurate information.

“The government is aware that this could delegitimize Delcy Rodríguez in the wake of the tragedy, raising questions about the state’s capacity and its management of resources,” Uzcátegui told CNN.

Amid the dearth of information, some Venezuelans have relied on unofficial websites to obtain information about the number of missing people.

One such venue is “Venezuela Reporta,” a crowdsourced database of missing person flyers, which estimates that there are tens of thousands of people missing after the earthquakes. CNN is unable to verify the figures provided by the database.

A Venezuelan entrepreneur living in Miami told CNN that he created the database with Claude Code a few hours after the earthquake struck. He asked CNN to withhold his name because he fears retaliation from the Venezuelan government, which he claims is obfuscating the real death toll.

“This is now an information war,” he told CNN. The government cannot provide the real number of dead “because at the end, it’s going to showcase that they were extremely inefficient.”

The government has said that it is taking stock of the number of people within the most affected areas at the time of the earthquakes. National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez, brother of acting President Delcy Rodríguez, said Tuesday that there were around 30,000 people in the hardest-hit parts of La Guaira state, of whom roughly 20,000 either escaped or were rescued.

No DNA tests

Speaking to CNN from Caracas, the pathologist said her colleagues are overwhelmed. Though Venezuela has received significant help from abroad for its rescue and recovery missions, she has not yet seen any volunteer pathologists to help to prepare and identify bodies.

She said that because so many bodies are badly decomposed, mourners are forced to identify bodies via tattoos, dental work or clothing. DNA testing is far too costly in Venezuela.

“There are so many children arriving, who are decomposing so much that their own family members won’t be able to recognize them,” she said. It has taken a toll on her. “I haven’t slept well. It’s horrible.”

Karelis D’Wuentt took a day-long bus ride from San Felix to Caracas to identify her 22-year-old brother at a mortuary there. She told CNN she’s exhausted. Her brother had been pulled out of a collapsed building on the first night of the earthquakes, she said, but died late Tuesday night from his injuries.

“I identified him because he has a tattoo here,” she said, pointing to her neck. “I have other family members who also died.”

All told, D’Wuentt has 12 family members still missing, three of whom have been found dead, including her brother. When CNN left her at the morgue, she was waiting outside for her little brother’s body. She does not know how she will pay for the funeral.

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