Venezuelan brothers who lost family in twin quakes hit by another earthquake in Colombia

Twin quakes strike Venezuela's coast

On 24 June 2026, two earthquakes of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 struck Venezuela with only 39 seconds between them, devastating La Guaira, the region most severely affected. Deivi Delfín, 15, and his brother Winder, 17, were returning from a day at the beach on the Venezuelan Caribbean coast when the ground began to shake at around 6pm. Winder had repeatedly asked to bring their 10-year-old brother Moissés along, but their mother Yusmani refused because the boy was being punished.

I insisted repeatedly, but my mother wouldn't hear of it.

When the brothers opened their eyes after embracing through the tremors, dust and debris surrounded them. They returned home to find their 12-story apartment building collapsed. Their mother Yusmani, grandmother Carmen, and younger brother Moissés were buried beneath the concrete. The Venezuelan government estimates more than 6,300 people died in the earthquakes, with no clear official count of the missing. La Guaira became a scene of exhaustive searches, where the scale of the disaster exceeded the capacity of specialist rescue teams.

A month of searching through rubble

The brothers joined rescue efforts immediately, working alongside neighbours and volunteers. For three days they had neither shelter nor food. Their father Deivid, who was working in Colombia at the time, traveled to Venezuela but could not locate his sons for 72 hours. Once reunited, he joined the search despite the danger of climbing through the unstable ruins.

My world collapsed on top of me.

As teenagers, Deivi and Winder could squeeze through narrow gaps in the rubble, crawling between concrete slabs. Over the course of about a month, they recovered fragments of their former life: a pair of Moissés's shorts, Yusmani's Bible, an incomplete shopping list. Deivi eventually spotted a piece of fabric he recognized as his grandmother Carmen's floral skirt. Firefighters then confirmed they had found a woman's body. The brothers themselves pulled the bodies of their three relatives from the rubble. The New York Times documented the brothers' desperate search.

At that moment, I no longer felt like a child.

A fresh start cut short

After the funerals, Deivi and Winder left Venezuela to join their father in a modest neighbourhood on the outskirts of Cali, Colombia, where Deivid works at a barbershop. They arrived on Friday 7 August. Three days later, on Monday 10 August, Colombia was struck by its strongest earthquake this century, a magnitude 7.4 tremor that killed hundreds across the country. Cali was among the most affected cities.

The earthquake is haunting me.

Speaking to the BBC from Cali, the teenagers and their father showed a maturity unusual for their age. The brothers described their hopes for their new life in Colombia, focused on studying and working. They said they want their mother, "wherever she is," to be proud of them.