"He found absolutely nothing of what the building itself had been." That is how Ricardo Ardiles, Lucas Trejo's brother-in-law, described what the Argentine footballer encountered when he arrived at his beachfront home in La Guaira after Venezuela's twin earthquakes struck last week.
His wife Yanina and their two children, Aarón and Ainhoa, were inside. Or they were supposed to be. Three days of searching through rubble gave Trejo nothing but silence and debris. On Sunday, Club Sport Marítimo La Guaira — the Venezuelan second-division side he plays for — confirmed what everyone feared. The family was gone.
"Lucas, you are not alone. Your family at Maritime La Guaira is with you," the club posted, alongside a photo of the four of them together.
A disaster that tore through Venezuelan football
Trejo, 38, was at a team training camp in Caracas when two earthquakes — classified by the US Geological Survey as a rare "doublet," striking just 39 seconds apart — levelled parts of the coast. La Guaira, 18 miles north of the capital, took a direct hit. He rushed home. He found nothing.
Friends and teammates recorded a video begging for heavy machinery to help with the search. "Right now we only have one machine, but it's not enough," said Metropolitanos F.C. player Robert Garcés. It wasn't enough. The 72-hour survival window has now passed, and more than 1,400 people are confirmed dead across the country, with thousands still missing.
Trejo's loss is the most visible, but it is not the only one football is counting. Yimvert Berroteran, 18 years old and fresh from the U-17 World Cup in Doha, is dead. So are young players Víctor Palacios and Razan Sijaa. Héctor Bello's partner died shielding their infant daughter from the collapse. "I'll make sure to remind our baby girl how wonderful you were and how much you loved her," Bello wrote on social media.
There is no football angle to reach for here, no competitive picture to analyse. Venezuelan football has lost players, children, partners — people. The season, whenever it resumes, will do so in a country still pulling bodies from the rubble.
