The Venezuelan dog team clawing through rubble in La Guaira learned the work in Adıyaman.
The K9 Training and Disaster Response Unit, a Venezuelan volunteer group, brought 15 search dogs to one of the hardest-hit areas after twin earthquakes flattened parts of northern Venezuela. Its handlers built that capacity in Türkiye, where the unit deployed after the 6 February 2023 quakes.
Coordinator Marcos Sequera said the team spent about 20 days in Adıyaman in 2023, and thanked the Turkish people and TİKA. Member Marielvis Sanchez said Adıyaman was their first mission with collapsed buildings and people trapped under rubble, and that the experience is now helping them save lives at home.
TİKA, the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency, outfitted the unit with uniforms, helmets, and two vehicles for moving handlers and dogs. The uniforms carry the TİKA logo. The vehicles carry a line: "From the heart of the Turkish people." The team is also learning Turkish through the Yunus Emre Institute and the Maarif Foundation, and credits Türkiye's embassy in Caracas for support.
That is the part that compounds. Türkiye's own disaster, three years on, is now Venezuelan expertise pulling Venezuelans out of the ground.
The official deployment sits around it. Türkiye's mission in Venezuela runs to 75 personnel, five search-and-rescue vehicles, and six rescue dogs, according to Turkish officials. Two Turkish Air Force A400M transport aircraft flew in the teams last week, including units from the Turkish Armed Forces Humanitarian Aid Brigade working alongside AFAD, the country's disaster authority.
Health Minister Kemal Memişoğlu said Türkiye's National Medical Rescue Team and fully equipped emergency units went to the Yaracuy region. Defense Ministry spokesman Rear Adm. Zeki Aktürk said Turkish teams and dogs were running round-the-clock operations. TİKA delivered about 1,000 aid packages.
Venezuela noticed. Interim President Delcy Rodriguez thanked 31 countries, Türkiye among them, for rescue teams and aid. "The joint response from 31 countries, alongside Venezuelan rescue groups, has shown us that we are not alone," she wrote on X. "Venezuela will remember this solidarity forever."
The scale of what those teams walked into is hard to hold. The two quakes, magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, hit 39 seconds apart on 24 June 2026, according to the US Geological Survey. National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez put the confirmed dead at 2,295 on Wednesday, with 11,267 injured and 12,841 displaced. Relatives had reported more than 68,000 people missing by 27 June. The UN Development Programme estimated $6.7 billion in direct physical damage. Rodriguez declared seven days of national mourning.
On the ground: 26,121 Venezuelan personnel, 3,660 foreign rescue workers, 148 trained dogs, and 15,467 volunteers.
One of them found Hernán Alberto Gil Flores, 44, a security guard, alive on Thursday, eight days after the buildings came down. He had been on shift at the Galerias Playa Grande shopping center in Catia La Mar when it collapsed, and survived inside a reinforced concrete parking-booth desk that held as a shell around him, nearly nine meters (about 30 feet) down under roughly 140 tons of unstable concrete.
A Costa Rican Red Cross team heard his voice over the weekend. More than 100 specialists from Chile, the United States, Portugal, El Salvador, and Costa Rica worked to reach him, passing water, an IV drip, and basic care down a guide tube. Anadolu Ajansı, citing Chile's fire brigade, said the extraction took 70 hours; the BBC said crews freed him more than 100 hours after first locating him, a figure that may count from first contact rather than active digging. He came out in stable condition with an eye injury and went to Caracas by ambulance. A Chilean firefighter called it the most technically difficult rescue he had worked. Engineers watched a damaged building nearby tilt nine millimeters an hour.