There is a cruel side to disasters that happen right away. They come when people are not together, like when a wife is at home with her child and her husband is across town at work. That’s where the earthquakes in Venezuela on June 24, 2026, happened. Sharp, quick, and not kind at all.
Within 39 seconds of each other, two quakes with magnitudes 7 or higher hit the northern coast of the country. Seismologists call this a rare “doublet.” The worst of it hit the area around La Guaira, a city on the coast just north of Caracas. In an instant, buildings that had been standing for decades fell down. The places where families used to live changed into something completely different.
Argentine Lucas Trejo plays for Club Sport Marítimo La Guaira in Venezuela’s second division. When the ground shook, he was at a team camp in Caracas. He almost right away drove the 18 miles back to La Guaira. His brother-in-law Ricardo Ardiles said that what he found was “absolutely nothing” because the building where his family lived had collapsed in on itself. Inside were his wife Yanina and their two little kids, Aarón and Ainhoa.
You’ll remember what Trejo did next. He used his hands to start digging. He did it by hand instead of with tools because the tools hadn’t arrived yet. He told Noticias Telemundo that the first machine that came was too small to move the bigger pieces of concrete. He looked for three days. Someone told him that a young child had been pulled out of the building alive and he checked hospitals. He asked the public for bigger machines. Friends and teammates made a video pleading his case.
The search was over on Sunday. A simple post on the club’s social media page said it all: “Lucas, you are not alone.” “Your family at Maritime La Guaira is with you.” Aarón, Ainhoa, and Yanina were no longer there.
Trejo is 38 years old. He plays football in a league in a different country than his own. His work isn’t particularly well known around the world, but in the past few days, people from all over the world have heard about him. It’s possible that the image of a man digging through rubble with his bare hands, refusing to accept what the earth had already decided, moves people more than the tragedy itself.
Héctor Bello, another player on his team, lost someone else, and it was a very heavy loss for him. Andrea, Bello’s 27-year-old wife, was home when the earthquakes happened. She was with Alana, their one-year-old daughter. Family members who spoke to Noticias Telemundo said that Andrea did what any mother would do when everything went wrong. The mother threw herself on top of her child. Alana made it. Andrea didn’t do it.
A lot of people have seen Bello’s Instagram tribute, which makes sense. When he wrote to his daughter about the woman who saved her, he talked about phone calls, inside jokes, the baby hanging up the line, and Andrea laughing so hard that her cheeks turned red. Those details bring a level of closeness that can’t be found in a press release or news summary. Grief written straight out, which is exactly what it is. “You left me to fight this battle alone—a battle we always said was ours to face together,” he wrote.
It was bad enough that over 1,400 people died. A lot more people were hurt. Tens of thousands of people are still missing. 18-year-old Yimvert Berroteran is also among the dead. He played in the U-17 World Cup in Doha just a few months ago. A young player who had just started playing football in Venezuela died.
When you read about Trejo and Bello, you feel more than just sadness. You feel something harder to put into words. These are men whose job it is to compete, so they are physically fit, professional, and used to being under pressure. That didn’t get them ready for this. It was impossible for anything to have. It didn’t matter what shirt they were wearing or how many games they had played.
Venezuela is still getting people out of the rubble. The search for survivors has not stopped. There is still some hope out there somewhere. Two families with ties to the same football team in the second division, however, have already closed the book in the worst way possible. After a loss, there is no second chance. They just stay with one person.
