First, Leticia helped her partner, Gabriel, find the body of his teenage daughter. But the two decided to continue living in a tent beside the ruins to help others.
Vanessa Davies
Leticia Alfonso left everything behind. Literally: she walked away from her job and her life to move into a tent beside the devastation that now surrounds the Opppe buildings in Playa Los Cocos. Leticia, known in the disaster zone as “la llanerita,” remains there with her partner, Gabriel, whom she decided to accompany through his grief.
“My partner’s 15-year-old daughter lived in Opppe 27 with his former partner. He is a truck driver. I work nationwide, and I was in Barcelona when the earthquake struck.” That is how she begins her story.
The last thing she knew, around noon on June 24, was that Gabriel planned to travel with his daughter. “But what happened, happened. I tried to reach him, but I couldn’t. I became desperate. I spoke with my family in Guárico, and everyone was fine. On the fifth day, I finally reached Gabriel, and he told me, ‘I’m alive, but I don’t know where my daughter is.’ So I left my job. I told my boss I couldn’t continue, that my partner was in trouble, and I got on a bus from Barcelona to Caracas.”
On the way, the bus ran off the road: “Things that happen.” Despite everything, Leticia reached Caracas before dawn and made her way to La Guaira. “When I arrived, I asked where Gabriel was. When I finally found him, his hands were torn up because, in desperation, he had dug through the rubble with his bare hands to get his daughter out. I asked him, ‘Papi, why did you go in there like that?’ And he answered, ‘Mami, because my daughter is in there. I feel she’s alive. We’re going to keep going; we’re going to fight.’ Then I approached a colonel, and he told me he would see what he could do, but he never gave me an answer. At the golf course, I spoke with a general, who told me, ‘Don’t worry, niña, I’m going to get you an answer.’ I was trying to find tools to help Gabriel when a soldier came looking for me and told me that they were putting a crew under my command. And they did come to help me. I thank God for putting that feeling in the general’s heart, and the general helped me.”
“We’re still here”
With better equipment, Leticia and Gabriel managed to open passages through the rubble. “We searched the apartment from top to bottom, but the girl wasn’t inside the apartment; she was in the hallway. We spent hellish days searching, pulling out every body we found along the way and notifying the families,” she recalls.
They no longer knew where to look. “A man asked my husband, ‘Gabriel, what was your daughter wearing?’ He explained that she was wearing a white T-shirt and school sweatpants. He described her. And the man replied, ‘I found your daughter.’ How could that be? The girl was in a different place.”
Gabriel entered a passage rescuers had opened through the rubble and recognized his daughter. “He carried her out with the help of the Topos. God helped him because he put up an emotional shield.” They took her body to the silos, “and three days later, they gave us her ashes.”
Still, Leticia and Gabriel decided to keep helping others. “And to this day, we’re still here.”
