Among the many human tragedies emerging from Venezuela's double earthquake is the story of 146 Venezuelans who had just been deported from the United States, only to die or be caught in the disaster within hours of arriving home. Their fate has become one of the most wrenching threads in the wider catastrophe.
The group of 146 had been repatriated from the United States to La Guaira on the very day the twin earthquakes struck, a coincidence of timing that turned a return home into a disaster. They had made it back to Venezuelan soil just as the ground began to shake.
According to the account, the deportees were waiting to complete their administrative processing at a center in the La Guaira area. It was there that the earthquakes caught them, at a facility meant to be a way station in their return rather than the site of a tragedy.
The center collapsed under the force of the tremors. A satellite image of the site showed the building brought down, a stark illustration of how the quakes flattened structures across the coastal region where the deportees had been held.
For many families, the timing made the loss even harder to bear. Relatives of those who had been sent back had often not yet been reunited with them, meaning some may have died before they could see loved ones they had been waiting to welcome home.
Not everyone at the center was lost. Some of the people managed to extract themselves from the rubble, surviving the collapse of the building even as others around them did not, adding survivors' accounts to the grim record of what happened there.
The plight of the 146 is part of a far larger disaster. The official death toll from the twin earthquakes that struck Venezuela on 24 June has climbed to more than 2,295 and is still feared to be an undercount, with tens of thousands of people reported missing across the shattered La Guaira region.
The scale of the destruction has drawn a broad international response, with the European Union pledging around 5 million euros in aid and rescue teams from more than 20 countries joining the search. Preliminary estimates have put the cost of the damage as high as 11 billion dollars, even as stories like that of the 146 deportees underscore the human weight behind the numbers.