2-year-old boy rescued from rubble in Venezuela earthquake aftermath

Kleiber Moran, 2, was pulled alive from the rubble of his home in La Guaira state after six days trapped beneath debris. Jordanian rescuers reached him after UK teams had also tried to get to the child, and his aunt said the family had been waiting through the worst kind of uncertainty, with his mother, Ana Luz, 31, and his father, Carlos, still missing.

Andreína Sarmiento, 23, said she would care for her nephew with a “mother’s warmth” until his mother appears. When a friend called her in La Guaira to say Kleiber had been found, she fell to the floor and wept before racing to meet him. At the hospital in Caracas, she said the boy was initially in a state of shock but had stabilized by the next day, with only scratches on his arms and legs and no fractures.

The rescue came amid a national calamity that began on June 24, when two powerful earthquakes struck Venezuela’s north-central coast within seconds of each other in a doublet. The tremors measured magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5, hit La Guaira especially hard and triggered widespread collapse and damage across a region already strained by fragile infrastructure and mass displacement.

By late June, officials and aid groups put the death toll at roughly 1,430 to 1,450 people, with around 3,000 injured and tens of thousands missing. Hundreds of buildings had collapsed or been damaged, while more than 300 aftershocks kept shaking search crews and made access to buried survivors harder. The first 48 to 72 hours are the most critical window for finding people alive, although rescues can still happen later, as Kleiber’s did.

Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodríguez called the child’s rescue a “source of hope for our people” as the country continued to count its dead.