Blog de Valentina Oropeza

In four and a half hours, a developer used AI to build a platform to find Venezuela’s earthquake missing. Four months later, almost 30,000 people still haven’t been reached.

On June 24, two earthquakes struck northern Venezuela. That evening in Bogotá, Jorge Bastidas, a 32-year-old Venezuelan developer, watched the chat of a YouTube news stream fill up with names of people no one could find.

He opened an AI assistant, assigned it the roles of several engineers working in parallel, and launched the platform that same night. The next day, about 800,000 people visited it.

Today it holds 82,610 reports. 29,486 people still haven’t been reached.

The fast part ended that night. The hard part began afterward.

While I was interviewing Alceo, who had reported his cousin from La Guaira, he opened the platform to show me. His cousin had turned up on his own two days after the earthquake. Four months later, he was still listed as “no contact.”

AI can build a platform overnight. Finding out what happened to each person takes phone calls, volunteers, time, and an official registry that Venezuela’s government has not released.

“We shouldn’t wait for the State to act,” Jorge told me. “We still don’t know the real scale of the damage.”

What parts of disaster response can citizen-built technology take on, and which should never stop being the job of institutions?

The full story (in Spanish) is in BBC News Mundo.