With the death toll from the twin earthquakes surpassing 1,400, search operations paused Saturday morning as foreign NGOs consulted with legal counsel regarding the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control.
CARACAS — The dust hung low and yellow over the pulverized cinderblock of the northern suburbs on Saturday morning, carrying the faint, sweet smell of leaking natural gas and stale Polar beer. Beneath the concrete, an estimated 1,400 Venezuelans lay dead, with hundreds more trapped. Above them, international search-and-rescue teams stood in quiet clusters, carefully reviewing compliance matrices to ensure that clearing the debris would not inadvertently violate U.S. economic sanctions.
The critical 72-hour window for finding survivors following the twin earthquakes is rapidly narrowing, but major rescue operations were temporarily suspended pending guidance from the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control. Search dogs from the French civil defense force were ordered to sit beside the ruins of a collapsed Ministry of Health clinic, as handlers awaited confirmation that sniffing out trapped civil servants does not constitute "material support" to the government of Nicolás Maduro.
"We are eager to deploy our thermal imaging cameras and seismic acoustic sensors the moment legal clears it," said one American rescue technician, adjusting his hardhat as a faint tapping sound echoed from deep within a shattered parking structure. "But if we use heavy machinery to lift a concrete slab that is technically the property of a state-owned enterprise, we could face secondary sanctions and lose our banking privileges in the United States. We have to be smart about this."
It is a race against time, which is why we have expedited our request for a 48-hour humanitarian waiver to legally touch the sanctioned rubble.
By mid-afternoon, a heavy tropical rain had begun to fall, turning the ubiquitous gray dust into a thick paste. As international coordinators huddled under an olive-drab canvas tent attempting to verify whether a trapped family had ever transacted in the state-backed Petro cryptocurrency, local residents simply continued digging through the shattered masonry with their bare hands, entirely unaware of the severe financial penalties they were risking.