The Caribe Residences Tower, in the Los Cocos sector of Caraballeda, La Guaira state, is no longer just a building. As of July 5th, the site is a mountain of fractured concrete beneath which no one has been able to reach.  Thirteen-year-old twins Aron and Aranza Mendoza Orias used to live there. The last time anyone heard from them, they were there, in their apartment, with their mother, Yesenia Orias.

And that was before the earthquakes.

Their whereabouts are now a mystery. Ariari Mendoza—Yesenia’s husband and the twins’ father—doesn’t stop: he walks among the rubble, asks questions, removes stones with his hands when necessary, and asks again. He is working with a group of family and friends who came to dig on their own, because help from government agencies has been scarce: when rescuers do appear, they arrive without the machinery needed to break through the piled-up concrete.

On June 27th, three days after the earthquakes, they managed to make their way into two of the rooms, but they didn’t see the teenagers. And since they didn’t smell anything, they thought the twins had managed to escape or were still alive.

From Caracas, the twins’ 37-year-old cousin Andrés García continues his own search. He’s particularly worried because Aron is autistic. This means that if someone finds him—alive, disoriented, and frightened—the boy might not be able to say who he is or where he came from.

The twins are among the 3.9 million children and adolescents who—according to UNICEF estimates—live in the Venezuelan areas affected by the recent earthquakes. All of them, according to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Organic Law for the Protection of Children and Adolescents (LOPNNA), deserve special protection.

A thin layer of institutional protection

The earthquakes rendered the La Guaira headquarters of the Council for the Protection of Children and Adolescents unusable. This body, which should exist in each municipality, is responsible for guaranteeing and restoring the rights of minors when they are violated or threatened. The five child protection counselors in La Guaira state were located alive, but not unscathed from the disaster: one was injured, and the others were left grieving the loss of family members and close friends.

Three days later, instructions were issued for them and for the entire Comprehensive Child and Adolescent Protection System—that is, the set of institutions and public policies designed to guarantee the full enjoyment of their rights—and were communicated on the Instagram account of IDENNA (the National Council for the Rights of Children and Adolescents), the governing body in charge of the child protection system.

“The order is not to release the child to anyone who cannot prove they are a relative, but in practice, we can’t control this chaos,” a protection worker admitted.

And the following day, the fourth day after the quakes, the National Association of Child and Adolescent Protection Counselors in Venezuela (ASONACOP) was informed of the opening of a temporary headquarters in La Guaira, where four active counselors began operating in coordination with other state agents and international organizations.

A report by the non-governmental organization Cecodap and the Network for the Human Rights of Children and Adolescents (REDHNNA) determined that the Protection System maintains a basic response capacity despite the impact of the emergency, which allowed it to avoid—until July 2, when the report was published—a scenario of mass vulnerability for children and adolescents. However, they point out that among the weaknesses of the Protection System exposed by the emergency are the informality and fragmentation of inter-institutional coordination—the use of telephone contacts, messaging groups, bilateral communications, and offers of support, instead of a formal and permanent mechanism—and the absence of pre-established protocols for disaster situations.

“The emergency revealed certain gaps. The potential need to make territorial jurisdictions more flexible, mobilize council members from other municipalities, issue measures outside of ordinary jurisdiction, and use exceptional measures suggests that the ordinary framework of the Protection System does not offer sufficiently clear and expeditious responses for large-scale catastrophic situations,” the report states.

A name on a kid’s arm

At the Miguel Pérez Carreño Hospital in Caracas, protection officers decided to improvise a method as simple as it was desperate: take photos of the children and, for those who could speak, ask them the basics—their name, their parents’ names, the place from which they had been rescued—and write that information on their arms with a marker, as if they didn’t trust that anything else would survive the chaos. 

“We wrote down as much information as the children could clearly express,” a hospital worker, who preferred to remain anonymous, said on June 26, two days after the earthquakes, “but some are in shock, they can’t quite say their parents’ names, or they don’t speak yet because they are babies.” 

There was no protocol to follow at that point. At least not one they were clearly aware of. When asked if they knew how they should act, the worker admitted that they all acted guided by something much less formal: common sense. Protection workers were given a single, unequivocal order: do not release any child unless the claimant can prove, with documentation, that they are indeed their relative. The most formal procedure this worker was aware of was that hospitals have up to two hours to notify the on-call Child Protection Council when an unaccompanied minor is admitted.

But between the instruction and reality, there is a gap that this public employee knows by heart, because she crosses it every day.

“The order is not to release the child to anyone who cannot prove they are a relative, but in practice, we can’t control this chaos,” she admitted.

ASONACOP’s president lists a series of specific deficiencies in the Child Protection Councils prior to the disaster: insufficient office supplies, reduced staff, and incomplete multidisciplinary teams.

“That’s why it’s important that these protocols, instructions, and training are implemented in times of peace so that people develop clear criteria of respect and dignity that go beyond common sense,” emphasizes Estefanía Mendoza at the NGO Mulier, an organization that works on, among other things, the prevention of human trafficking. “We’re not reinventing the wheel. This has been done in other countries, so we don’t have to think about procedures right now.”

IDENNA announced on June 27th, via its Instagram account, the activation of a nationwide Mandatory Protocol for the Protection of Children and Adolescents in response to the seismic emergency. One of the main measures was the declaration of “Universal and Concurrent Jurisdiction,” a mechanism designed to overcome territorial bureaucracy. Under this new framework, child protection officers in the Caracas Metropolitan Area and neighboring states are obligated to attend to any emergency regardless of the victim’s residence; otherwise, officials who claim geographical incompetence could face criminal penalties for denying assistance.

The order prohibits public or private health centers from delaying or refusing medical attention to a minor due to a lack of documentation or the absence of their legal guardians. Furthermore, each health center must implement a “Special Contingency Registry Book” to allow for patient tracking. The Child Protection Council teams must maintain 24-hour shifts in the emergency and trauma rooms.

The protocol also imposes a security perimeter around hospital discharges to prevent cases of trafficking or irregular transfers. No vulnerable pediatric patient may be discharged or transferred without authorization from the Child Protection Council. Children and adolescents may only be released to their parents or legal guardians after rigorous verification of their parentage, while the State would assume shared institutional protection with the hospital in cases where the family cannot be located immediately.

Finally, to centralize the search for missing persons and mitigate misinformation from social media, IDENNA ordered that all identifying and medical information of children and adolescents be sent to its president within 12 hours. This data flow would be used to populate a unified database for family searches.

The missing persons walls

By June 29, the area outside the emergency rooms of the Pérez Carreño Hospital in western Caracas, and Domingo Luciani Hospital in the east end, were covered in paper. Each sheet contained at least one name of a missing person, or a list of people being treated at the hospital after the earthquakes. Among the paper-covered walls, nurses called out names, hoping a relative would come forward.

Amid the commotion were officials from the Child Protection Council, identified by their blue and black jackets and the logo of the Public Ministry. They were not allowed to speak to the press. However, in the Pérez Carreño Hospital  a young woman wearing an IDENNA shirt responded that 24 minors were being treated at the hospital in the context of the disaster. She assured that all of them were accompanied by their parents or guardians.

Meanwhile, at the University Hospital on the UCV campus, the hallways were quiet: only medical staff and family members were present. Around a handful of missing persons posters was a QR code that led to a database on the Ministry of Health’s website identifying the patients treated. At that hospital, there were no members of the Child Protection Council, at least not between 10:00 am and 2:00 pm on Monday, June 29. The pediatric emergency room reported that no child or adolescent was alone. However, a doctor in the intensive care unit confirmed that a young teenager was there without her parents. Her information does not appear in the Ministry of Health’s database. The doctor, who declined to give his name for fear of reprisals, only hopes that her family will find her.

“For years, the public administration’s capacity has been declining, and with a situation like this, those shortcomings are exponentially exacerbated,” says Lily Torres, president of ASONACOP. She lists a series of specific deficiencies in the Child Protection Councils prior to the disaster: insufficient office supplies, reduced staff, and incomplete multidisciplinary teams—the group of psychologists, social workers, and other specialists who should be supporting each child protection counselor in their daily work.

Information itself must be treated as part of child protection, with official verification mechanisms and regular bulletins to reduce misinformation and prevent additional risks.

Some of these deficiencies have been addressed with external support. Through an alliance with UNICEF, ASONACOP has managed to maintain multidisciplinary teams in several municipalities of the Caracas Metropolitan Area, support that, according to Torres, is helping to strengthen the response that the Child Protection Councils must provide during the emergency. Office supplies have also been delivered to some of their offices. But the earthquake made no distinction between what was already functioning and what was barely hanging on: in La Guaira, the psychologist who supported the council members in that area died during the tremors, and with her went part of the limited capacity they had.

Other circumstances—lack of resources, unfilled positions, precarious salaries— fundamentally limit a counselor’s capacity for action, even before any emergency occurs.

CECODAP and REDHNNA propose to create a national emergency coordination mechanism, a permanent space where all these institutions and the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Protection Courts, the Ombudsman’s Office, health authorities, and specialized civil society organizations work under common procedures to manage cases, share information, and advance family reunification.

In addition, there is a need to equip the system with national and municipal protocols designed for disasters, covering everything from the identification and registration of children to the operation of shelters and the regular training of staff.

Information itself must be treated as part of child protection, with official verification mechanisms and regular bulletins to reduce misinformation and prevent additional risks.

Finally, they call for strengthening the human, technical, and operational capacities of the system, prioritizing the hardest-hit areas, and for formally recognizing the role of civil society, whose work in specialized care, psychosocial support, and family searches has been, until now, a significant part of what has sustained the response.

This report was based on field research by Angélica Lugo, Gabriela Rojas, and Mariana Souquett. It is part of the series “Los niños del terremoto,” produced by La Vida de Nos, in partnership with Monitor de Víctimas and Tal Cual. Originally published on July 5 in La Vida de Nos – Venezuela Unida