Venezuela death toll doubles as interim president vows to save ‘as many people as possible’

Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez , has vowed to fight to save “as many people as possible” as the official death toll from the country’s worst earthquake in more than a century almost doubled, but frustration was growing at the perceived sluggishness of the government’s response. Rodríguez said on Friday that the official death toll had risen to 589, with nearly 3,000 people injured. Speaking during a tour of La Guaira , the most devastated region, Rodríguez said foreign search and rescue groups were starting to arrive. “We offer our solidarity [to families of victims],” she said late on Thursday outside the ruins of an eight-floor seafront hotel that had been obliterated by twin 7.2- and 7.5-magnitude quakes. Volunteer searchers and the relatives of the many missing voiced exasperation and anger at the lack of an official response as they waited for government teams. People walk amid rubble after the twin earthquake in Caraballeda, La Guaira state, about 40km northeast of Caracas. Photograph: Federico Parra/AFP/Getty Rotny Bombart, a 33-year-old paramedic, said he had spent five hours hunting for his mother, María Eugenia, in a collapsed tower block in La Guaira called OPP 33. “It has 15 floors. Or rather, it used to, because there’s nothing left of it now,” Bombart said after being treated at a public hospital in the capital, Caracas, for a gash to his right arm sustained during the search. …