MEXICO CITY (AP) — A man dressed head-to-toe in bright orange carefully stacks a dozen cardboard boxes on a luggage cart at Mexico City’s international airport. He is not an ordinary traveler. And these are not ordinary boxes.They contain body bags.The man is Germán Bello, a 39-year-old volunteer with the Brigada Internacional de Rescate Topos Azteca, one of Mexico’s best-known civilian search-and-rescue organizations. Founded after the devastating 1985 Mexico City earthquake, the nonprofit brigade operates independently and has earned an international reputation for deploying to major disasters at home and abroad.On Tuesday night, Bello was heading into one of Venezuela’s deadliest natural disasters in modern history. Nearly a week after two powerful earthquakes devastated the country’s Caribbean coast, authorities on Wednesday said more than 2,200 people have died and over 11,000 have been injured.
Hopes of finding survivors are fadingInternational rescue teams continue searching collapsed apartment buildings and homes in the hardest-hit state of La Guaira, even as hopes of finding more survivors fade and the mission increasingly shifts toward recovery.Bello does not know when he will return home. Along with rescue gear, he is carrying body bags and other gear that could be used to recover those killed in the earthquakes.An electrical engineer who owns a small auto repair shop, Bello is known within the brigade as “La Secre” — short for secretary — because he serves as the right-hand man to the group’s founder, veteran rescuer Héctor “El Chino” Méndez.
