Bodies are piling up at morgues and Venezuelans are digging through rubble with their hands, as state services collapse and the country’s US-backed leaders face growing anger over their response to last week’s twin earthquakes.The 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes that hit Venezuela on June 24 have left 1,943 people dead, the Venezuelan government said on Tuesday, with more than 10,000 people injured and 15,000 displaced.More than 42,000 reports of missing people have been sent to a website set up by the Venezuelan opposition, as the country’s US-backed authoritarian government has not given figures for those missing.The UN is procuring 10,000 body bags in anticipation of a rising death count, in a country mired in a years-long economic crisis.Forensic experts stand amid victims and coffins in La Guaira,Venezuela. Photograph: Juan BARRETO / AFP via Getty Images “Basic services have broken down,” the UN’s refugee agency said on Tuesday.In hard-hit La Guaira province, authorities have erected a makeshift morgue beneath grain silos at a seaport complex, where a near-constant stream of bodies has been arriving.From the gates, medical personnel could be seen moving bodies, unloading coffins and carrying bags of lime to help cover the putrid smell. Outside, relatives desperately awaited news of loved ones.[ ‘He’s under the slabs’: Venezuela clings to hope in wake of devastating earthquakesOpens in new window ]In the absence of a serious government search-and-rescue operation, residents have been saving neighbours themselves, removing chunks of rubble with their bare hands, as teams from more than 50 countries arrive to help.Among the missing are more than 100 Venezuelans who were deported from the US hours before the earthquake struck. The hotel they were believed to be staying in collapsed during the earthquakes.At the silos in La Guaira, Maikol Heredia found the body of his cousin Jorge Luis González, who was deported to Venezuela on June 24. “He hadn’t been back to Venezuela in nine years,” said Heredia, who is trying to raise the $850 needed to transfer the body to his home 720km away.Alicia Mendoza has searched hospitals and the makeshift morgue at the grain silo in search of her 38-year-old son, Alejandro Bisbal, one of the missing deportees. Authorities showed Mendoza a corpse with her son’s name attached, but she said it was not him.“I don’t understand all this chaos or why they can’t treat people with dignity,” she said.Hospitals and clinics have been overwhelmed by trauma patients, with “chaotic service delivery”, “overcrowding”, “growing surgical backlogs” and a “breakdown in biosafety measures”, the World Health Organisation warned.Coffins at an improvised morgue at the port in La Guaira, Venezuela. Photograph: Fabiola Ferrero/The New York Times