CARABALLEDA, Venezuela—The government-built high-rise where Alberto Sánchez’s girlfriend lived toppled into a mass of concrete and steel when twin earthquakes hit this Caribbean coastal city last week. He’s spent four days digging through rubble for her and her family—and found no one.
“Today I feel like I have no energy left,” Sánchez said on Sunday, his face weary as he took a break, blowing dust off his gloves and examining the holes in his sneakers.
Nearly 50,000 people are still unaccounted for, according to an online platform tracking missing loved ones, after Wednesday’s earthquakes flattened whole neighborhoods in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, and a string of cities nearby.
International rescue teams and frantic families are in a race against time, heaving debris aside in a desperate bid to find the last survivors. The hopes of finding them alive were fading fast, since people can survive only so long trapped beneath the rubble without water while inhaling suffocating dust.
The Venezuelan government said 1,450 had died and more than 3,100 were injured, with the heaviest damage reported here in the state of La Guaira on the Caribbean, about an hour’s drive from Caracas. The government says the number will rise, and the U.S. Geological Survey’s modeling estimated the likely death count would reach the thousands.
As the hours passed, the people here grew increasingly agitated about a state response that they said was inadequate and disorganized. Adding to the woes, some residents said, were efforts by acting President Delcy Rodríguez’s government to restrict volunteer workers’ access to disaster sites, as well as bureaucracy that slowed down paramedics, firefighters and rescue teams from overseas.
“The rescue efforts have been nonexistent,” said Janett Noriega, a retiree who was looking for six relatives, including her sister-in-law and young nieces, who had lived in one of several high-rise government housing projects near the beach. “It’s total chaos, without any planning.”
Noriega said she was angry and heartbroken. She and her husband have been driving every day from Caracas to Caraballeda, which was among the hardest hit. Noriega said she saw no rescue workers or heavy machinery arrive until the weekend.
The government didn’t respond to calls and emails seeking comment.
For many residents of the housing project where Sánchez and Noriega’s families lived, a series of 12-story buildings called the Caribbean Victors, the tragedy laid bare what people here called years of government negligence and inadequate construction.
Decades earlier, Caraballeda was a beach town beloved by rich and middle-class Venezuelans. Nearby were a golf club, a marina for yachts and hotels run by Sheraton and Spain’s Melia. The state housing was built near Los Cocos beach, when Venezuela’s leftist government rushed to provide apartments to the poor as a way to win votes.
“I used to say that these apartments are toy houses, made of styrofoam,” Noriega said.
But it was no joke. The buildings collapsed into heaps, exposing thick layers of styrofoam that had been used as mortar between slabs of concrete. Much of the disaster site was covered with small pellets of white foam. Some residents said the walls in their buildings were already cracking before the quakes and rebar was exposed in some columns, signs of what they called shoddy construction.
Sánchez moved in with his girlfriend, Osmary, to one of the projects last year and said it was well-known that the buildings were poorly built. But residents felt they had little choice because they couldn’t afford better.
“We already knew that the buildings were made poorly, but what choice did we have?” said Sánchez, a 37-year-old motorcycle taxi driver who had lived on the ninth floor with Osmary.
Sitting on a rock with a blank expression on his face, Sánchez said he’s been trying to keep his mind occupied by helping people from nearby buildings dig for survivors. But he hadn’t found anyone he knew.
“I lost everything,” Sánchez said.
Over the weekend, thousands of armed Venezuelan soldiers and police were deployed across the towns lining the Caribbean’s turquoise coast, communities that serve as a getaway for residents of the capital—known as caraqueños—and are home to many working-class families. But it was teams of firefighters and rescue workers from Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and the U.S. who crawled through slabs of concrete in search of survivors.
On Sunday, they pleaded with passersby and motorcyclists to keep quiet as they tried to listen for any sound of life—a cry for help, a cough or heavy breathing—from people under the rubble.
Rescuers at one building found the lifeless body of a 4-year-old boy. They wrapped his little body in a purple blanket before carrying him to a vehicle from the local police homicide unit, repurposed as a coroner’s van.
It wasn’t easy for the rescuers, and not just because of the conditions on the ground. The mayor of Medellín, Colombia, said firefighters sent from his city were held up for hours by airport authorities in Venezuela. A unit of Spanish volunteers said it was disbanding after having waited two days at an airport in Spain for accreditation from Venezuelan authorities.
“The only machinery that has arrived was brought by the families of the people who are trapped underneath,” said Karen Marchan, 37, who had been searching for her mother, Cecilia Gutiérrez, in Caraballeda.
Jennifer Fajardo, 42, who manages security operations at a Caracas university, wiped tears from her face as she took a break from moving rubble in search of her twin 19-year-old daughters and two granddaughters, all of whom shared an apartment in a building that collapsed. With power and phone lines down since the quakes, Fajardo said she had been unable to reach family members and instead rushed to the scene.
“I haven’t slept. I’m running from hospital to hospital, to the morgues to see if they’re there—but nothing,” Fajardo said. “I just want my daughters to appear.”
Early Sunday, Fajardo received a sign of hope when the family dog, Yogi, known to neighbors for running up and down the stairs, emerged from a hole in the rubble, seemingly unscathed. Since then, he’s been standing at the edge of the property squealing and crying.
“I think if the dog came out alive, one of them has to be alive as well,” Fajardo said, as Yogi sat next to her whimpering. “It’s OK, my love,” Fajardo said, patting his head. “We’ll find them.”
Not far away, Jhoana Pacheco, 47, and more than 20 relatives were still at it Sunday, searching for her aunt, Yveth Arguinzones, 61, and her husband, Alexis González, 63, who remained missing when the Los Cocos housing complex collapsed.
Some searched hospitals. Others went to shelters. Family members were also at the building.
“My two uncles went there to help, but there wasn’t much they could do because all they had were two sledgehammers,” she said. “There was nothing else—not even a crowbar or a pickax—to break through the concrete.”
Families like hers aren’t thinking about anything other than pulling survivors out of what’s left of the buildings. They also know that eventually their mission will be recovering the dead.
“They just want to get those buried under the debris out,” she said. “At least find the bodies, just to have an answer.”
Write to Kejal Vyas at kejal.vyas@wsj.com