Locals in La Guaira, the most devastated state of Venezuela following last week’s twin earthquakes, denounced on Thursday that a man known as “El Topo de la Guaira,” identified as Wilmer Antonio Cruz, disappeared on Wednesday night after repeatedly condemning the socialist regime for failing to help those trapped in rubble.
Cruz had been working for days as a volunteer at the collapsed building he is believed to have lived in before the earthquakes, which international media identified as OPPPE 26 in Caraballeda, a massive complex featuring 876 apartments before it fell apart. Video interviews with the man recorded prior to his disappearance this week show him shirtless, using a bucket and a hammer to dig through a massive pile of debris looking for trapped neighbors.
Google Maps shows the apartment complex at OPPPE 26 in La Guaira, Venezuela prior to the earthquakes on June 24.
Two earthquakes, registering magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5, struck Venezuela on the night of June 24, devastating La Guaira and parts of Caracas, the national capital. Venezuela was already suffering from the near-total lack of a competent healthcare system, extreme poverty, and a dearth of emergency services as a result of over two decades of socialist rule, leaving it poorly equipped to address the disaster. The American space agency NASA estimated this week, using satellite images, that the earthquakes damaged or destroyed as many as 60,000 buildings as the socialist regime had built massive public housing complexes without following appropriate earthquake protocols.
As of Friday, the Venezuelan government has documented 2,595 deaths as a result of the earthquakes and claims to have rescued 6,462 people. The United Nations and opposition groups estimate that over 50,000 people are missing, their chance of making it out of the rubble alive dwindling rapidly.
Locals in Caraballeda began denouncing that unidentified regime agents abducted Cruz on Wednesday night. Human rights activist Tamara Suju, sharing videos from eyewitnesses who said they saw Cruz’s detention, shared that the witnesses claimed Cruz intervened to defend a friend who was trying to use construction machinery to break through debris and rescue people, but was stopped by socialist agents.
The Venezuelan Committee for the Freedom of Political Prisoners denounced Cruz’s disappearance on Thursday, sharing testimonies from relatives in the area who described unidentified agents wearing all black taking Cruz away. According to the human rights group, Cruz and his volunteer team “needed a jackhammer to break through a beam and keep the search going.”
“In that moment, various individuals dressed completely in black and without visible identification approached.” A relative claiming to be Cruz’s in-law said that the agents asked Cruz to leave with them alone and no one has seen him since, and that he had been threatened by unknown men during his work in search and rescue.
Other reports have claimed that Cruz intervened to prevent Venezuelan government officials from taking away construction machinery that his group could have used to continue digging, causing police to whisk him away.
The Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional reported that Cruz was arrested by the National Bolivarian Police (PNB), the domestic repressive forces used to silence anti-government dissidents. Some reports on social media claimed that Cruz was currently in El Helicoide, the regime’s premier torture center for political dissidents, but Breitbart News has not been able to independently verify those claims. The Venezuelan socialist regime has not addressed the situation.
Prior to his disappearance, Cruz was beginning to become one of the most recognizable faces of the Venezuelan earthquake response. He had offered interviews to multiple Venezuelan journalists, seeking out cameras to plead with the government to share its equipment to help find his family. Speaking to the Venezuelan newspaper on Tuesday, he lamented that, while he had helped pull over 60 people out of rubble, “I have not been able to rescue a single fingernail of my family.”
In another interview more recently, Cruz appeared more agitated and directly condemned the socialist government for abandoning earthquake victims.
Asking for machinery to rescue the bodies of his relatives, Cruz said, “I know that they are not like us, they are decomposed already, but that is the demand I have, the hate that I have – because I have a lot of hate and I will tell the people – I have too much hate because they have to help us here and they have not helped us.”
“Look at how we are here,” he continued, showing his hands and holding up a bucket to the camera. “Is it possible this is the machine that we have here? These poor hands, look at how I have them all destroyed, with no gloves, no cover, nothing.”
In another video of the man, apparently commenting to various media outlets, he denounced “shitty soldiers” who were not helping, accusing them of being “disgusted by human beings.”
“I have gone down – me, Wilmer Antonio Cruz – I have gone down, with pants, 30 meters down with no face mask, no shirt, no gloves, and I took out over 50 dead, between living and dead,” he shared.
Cruz is far from the first Venezuelan to accuse the socialist regime of interim “president” Delcy Rodríguez of not doing enough to help pull survivors from the rubble, despite being offered aid from dozens of countries around the world, including emergency personnel and humanitarian aid from the United States. Survivors have accused police of attempting to extort them for access to their loved ones’ dead bodies and for help in search and rescue. Reports have also documented police actively looting crumbled buildings. In one especially dramatic incident, a group of women outside the remains of their building in La Guaira caught officers with Venezuela’s Scientific, Penal, and Criminalistic Investigation Service Corps (CICPC) digging out large bags of American dollars from rubble, physically tore the bags away from them, and destroyed the cash.
“They came here and knew there was money,” one woman, identified as Melisa Páez, told the outlet El Pitazo. “I don’t know if they were sent here or if they’re acting on their own, but it can’t be right that, in the midst of our dead, the only thing on their minds is recovering material possessions.”
Venezuelan journalists have accused the nation’s interior minister, wanted alleged drug lord Diosdado Cabello, of interrupting search and rescue operations to protect hidden stashes of cash and cocaine. Cabello was caught on video this week blocking an American search and rescue team from entering an area where people were trapped under rubble, a situation the State Department referred to as an “unfortunate misunderstanding.”