An El Salvador search and rescue team pulled a small dog named Giselle from a collapsed residential building in Caraballeda, Venezuela, nearly a week after twin earthquakes leveled whole neighborhoods across the coastal state of La Guaira. The five-hour extraction, captured on video and shared by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, offered a rare moment of relief in a disaster that has now killed more than 1,900 people and left tens of thousands missing.
Rescuers heard barking from a dark crevice deep in the rubble of Residencial El Palmar. They worked for five hours before freeing the dog, who licked a rescuer's face upon extraction and was then fed through a syringe by a doctor on scene. Giselle had been trapped for five days.
Bukele posted the video on X on June 30, writing in part:
"After 5 hours, we managed to rescue this little dog who responds to the name Giselle, in Residencial El Palmar, Caraballeda. If anyone is her owner, they can approach our teams in the area and prove with photos or videos that she is theirs."
The rescue is a small bright spot in a catastrophe of staggering scale, one that has exposed both the fragility of Venezuelan infrastructure and the limits of the Maduro regime's capacity to respond.
The twin earthquakes, magnitudes 7.5 and 7.2, struck just after 6 p.m. local time on June 24, hitting within a minute of each other. The back-to-back jolts destroyed thousands of buildings across La Guaira and surrounding areas. The New York Post reported the quakes hit just 39 seconds apart, killing at least 1,943 people, including at least three Americans, injuring more than 10,571, displacing 15,000, and leaving nearly 50,000 still missing by the disaster's sixth day.
NASA satellite imagery assessed that approximately 58,870 buildings were likely damaged or destroyed, a figure that helps explain why rescue operations have ground on day after day with no end in sight.
The United Nations has said tens of thousands remain missing. The confirmed death toll climbed past 1,900 as of Tuesday, though that number almost certainly undercounts the true scale of loss given how many people remain unaccounted for beneath collapsed concrete.
While the Maduro government has deployed military and police to the disaster zone, the most visible rescue successes have come from international teams, a pattern that has drawn sharp criticism from Venezuelan civilians on the ground.
El Salvador's team rescued the dog and has been working to free Hernán Gil Flores, a 44-year-old security guard trapped beneath a partially collapsed 10-story building in La Guaira for six days at the time of reporting. Bukele described the operation in a separate post, noting that ongoing aftershocks have complicated the effort enormously.
"The aftershocks have made this one of the most difficult rescues we have ever faced. However, despite all these challenges, Hernán continues to respond, and we have managed to keep him hydrated, so we hold out hope that this rescue will be a success."
Manny Sampang, a task force leader with the Los Angeles County Fire Department who traveled to Venezuela for the rescue effort, told CBS News the situation around Flores is precarious. "It is a very complex rescue," Sampang said. "I have multiple buildings leaning into that building that we are trying to rescue him from."
Virginia Urban Search and Rescue Task Force 1 pulled a mother and her 9-month-old baby from rubble, reporting that both sustained "only minor injuries." In a separate rescue, an 18-day-old baby and the child's mother were freed from a collapsed high-rise after being trapped for 32 hours. Aftershocks have continued to rattle the region, adding danger to already treacherous conditions for rescuers and survivors alike.
U.S. Southern Command has deployed Marines and military assets to assist. SOUTHCOM stated that "all U.S. military operations are completely self-sustaining, with personnel on the ground requiring zero local resources as they work tirelessly to deliver critical relief to the people of Venezuela." The self-sustaining posture is notable, it means American forces are not drawing from Venezuela's already overwhelmed supply chain.
The contrast between international rescue teams and the Venezuelan government's own performance has not gone unnoticed by survivors. The Associated Press reported that frustration boiled over as the critical 72-hour survival window closed, with residents blocking government equipment and confronting officials they accused of prioritizing optics over action.
Yeison Marcano, a rescue volunteer, told the AP: "They came to eat arepas and take pictures to make it look like they were working. They didn't even get their uniforms dirty like we have. We've been here for three days." Another searcher, Mileidy Romero, said: "At 8 p.m. (yesterday) there were people alive down there, and they haven't bothered to rescue them."
Venezuelan officials said 17 flights carrying more than 1,600 rescue team members had arrived by Saturday, and acting President Delcy Rodríguez stated over 14,000 military and police personnel were patrolling the area. But access to the disaster zone was restricted, requiring special permits, a move that raised questions about whether the regime was managing the crisis or managing the narrative.
Reports have also surfaced that Venezuelan officials were caught on video blocking American rescuers from accessing certain sites, a development that drew bipartisan condemnation and underscored the tension between a regime that wants to control information and a disaster that demands transparency.
The sheer volume of building collapses has raised hard questions about construction standards in Venezuela. Breitbart reported that three brothers survived the collapse of five of eleven floors at the Charaima complex in Caraballeda, a detail that speaks to both the severity of the structural failures and the randomness of survival. Volunteer worker Daniela Guerra told NBC News, as quoted by Breitbart: "The first few hours were the most important. There were several moments in which we would ask for silence, and yell out, 'Is anyone alive?'"
Investigations into the quality of materials used in Venezuelan construction have already begun to surface. Some buildings reportedly revealed Styrofoam in their structural elements, raising the possibility that decades of corruption and mismanagement in Venezuela's construction sector contributed directly to the death toll.
That is a question worth pressing. When nearly 59,000 buildings are damaged or destroyed in a single event, the problem is not just seismic, it is institutional. Countries with strong building codes and honest enforcement lose far fewer lives in earthquakes of comparable magnitude. Venezuela, after a quarter century of socialist governance, appears to have neither.
Giselle the dog is alive. Hernán Gil Flores, the 44-year-old security guard, was still responding to rescuers and being kept hydrated as of Bukele's last update, but his extraction had not yet been completed. Whether he survived remains an open question.
The broader open questions are just as pressing. How many of the tens of thousands still listed as missing are alive? How many are buried under buildings that should never have collapsed? And how much of this catastrophe was compounded by a government more interested in controlling access than saving lives?
A dog pulled from five days of darkness is a good story. But the people of Venezuela deserve more than miracles. They deserve a government that builds structures that stand and a response that puts rescue ahead of regime management.
