Living Miracle: Venezuelan Man Rescued After Eight Days Under Rubble
On 24 June, twin earthquakes rattled Venezuela, collapsing the parking lot of the Galerías Playa Grande mall in Catia La Mar. Hernán Gil, a security guard, lay beneath 140 tonnes of concrete and debris. He endured eight days of entrapment, the inside of a concrete booth offering a protective shell.
Rescuers from Venezuela, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, El Salvador, the United States, and Portugal joined forces. After 100 hours of painstaking excavation, they finally drew Gil out alive, his body wrapped in a bright orange blanket and connected to an IV and oxygen.
President Delcy Rodríguez visited Gil in hospital and described the quakes as “a natural tragedy on a scale we never imagined.” She asserted that the government deployed thousands of officials promptly. The rescue has been hailed as a “living miracle,” highlighting the power of community solidarity and inter‑regional collaboration.
Gil’s own account relays how he survived: the concrete booth shielded him, and he did not suffer a crushed nail. He later responded to rescuers’ questions with cheerful humor, even requesting specific flavors of water. A Chilean firefighter performed the most technically demanding extraction, and a Costa Rican paramedic praised Gil’s endurance.
The incident reignites the importance of indigenous knowledge of sand and earth, communal care, and the shared sense of resilience. When people from diverse cultures unite to lift a trapped survivor, they reinforce an ancestral ethic of taking care of one another in times of crisis.
"He himself drove us on, telling us to carry on," said Moreno, a paramedic who had never before encountered such international collaboration. Gil’s rescue offers a beacon of hope and demonstrates that even in disaster, the strength of the community endures.
