In rescue operations, the first 72 hours are known as "the golden window." It is the critical time limit during which the human body can withstand extreme conditions — primarily without water — and the period when rescue teams concentrate their greatest efforts, because it is when the chances of finding survivors are highest.
It is possible to rescue people alive after that threshold, even days later. Possible, but not probable. Dehydration, physical exhaustion, and psychological collapse dramatically reduce those odds. The human body can survive weeks without food, but rarely more than three days without water.
For this reason, when the 72-hour mark passes, the operation shifts from "search and rescue" to "recovery."
As that threshold is reached — 72 hours since the earthquake of Wednesday, June 24 — thousands of people remain missing. "Thousands" is easy to say. Different platforms have documented anywhere from 1,000 to 60,000 people still unaccounted for, and in the absence of reliable official information — or any official information at all — it is nearly impossible to know anything with certainty, including how or where to ask for help.
For now, Venezuelans have each other. Citizen initiatives to help — gathering, cross-referencing, and verifying information; raising funds and resources; organizing in person and remotely — number in the hundreds. People are offering what they have, and what they don't have, to support and protect their fellow citizens in the face of what is probably the worst tragedy the country has experienced in the last century — if we don't count the devastation caused by the dictatorship. And we should count it, because twenty-seven years of corruption, looting, and abuse have left the country without the infrastructure to withstand and respond to a natural disaster of this magnitude.
For the same reason, no figure that any mapping or documentation initiative can offer today tells the complete story — because the complete story was shattered by the fist of the official version, which lies to us and claims 1,430 dead and 3,238 injured after an earthquake that leveled entire towns. It does not account for the damage caused by power failures, connectivity outages, media censorship and blackouts, or poverty. It does not account for what is still happening in places where rescuers and ordinary people have no supplies, no tools, no internet connection. It does not account for what is happening in places where they are not allowed through, because the authorities chose to exercise power in the most cruel and arbitrary way.
Now is the time to tend to our wounded, to support one another, to hold back the trauma, to shelter those who lost their homes. The time to rebuild what we lost will come. But we are not alone.
We have each other.