At the port of La Guaira, one of the places the earthquake hit hardest, Venezuela handed out a medal it had just created.
On Friday, 4 July, interim president Delcy Rodríguez pinned the new Hero of Venezuela medal on the foreign search-and-rescue leaders who had worked the rubble after last month's quakes. Two of them were Turkish, according to Anadolu Agency: Brigadier General Mehmet Bahtiyar, who commands the Turkish Armed Forces' Humanitarian Aid Brigade, and Haluk Onay Erten, a deputy provincial director of AFAD, Türkiye's disaster agency, in Denizli.
Rodríguez also sent a thank-you medal and a letter to Erdoğan, handed to Türkiye's ambassador in Caracas, Naci Aydan Karamanoğlu, to carry back to Ankara. By the ambassador's account, she said Türkiye had stood with Venezuela from the first moment of the disaster. Venezuela's foreign minister, Yvan Gil, and interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, were at the ceremony.
Six of the Turkish dogs got a medal of their own, the Hero Dog. They belong to the same teams, trained in Adıyaman after the 2023 earthquakes, whose story we told earlier this week.
The scale is still moving. Venezuela's Communication and Information Ministry put the death toll at 3,342 by 5 July, with 16,740 injured, and said more than 6,400 people had been pulled out alive. It counted more than 4,000 international rescue workers on the ground, alongside some 30,000 Venezuelan personnel.
Türkiye's aid is still arriving. Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said TİKA, the state cooperation agency, had delivered rescue gear, food and hygiene kits to Venezuelan authorities, with shelter and basic supplies to follow in the coming days.
The mission is not over. The medals came while Turkish teams were still on the ground and the aid was still landing.