Jorge Bastidas shows the Desaparecidos Terremoto Venezuela platform on his cell phone — Photo: Daniella Fernández Realin
A friend called Jorge Bastidas to warn him about the earthquakes in Venezuela. Although he seemed scared, Jorge doubted it was anything serious. The country had already gone through so many crises that he ruled out the possibility of being surprised again.
The 32-year-old Venezuelan programmer, who lives in Argentina, was in Bogotá on work. He canceled all meetings and started trying to contact his family, but the calls didn't go through. The Venezuelan colleagues around him were also unable to communicate with their families.
Half an hour after the two earthquakes that occurred on June 24, Bastidas found, in the chat of a news channel on YouTube, that the majority of users were asking for information about loved ones who remained incommunicado.
"I wish I could have been there and helped in a more direct way, but I couldn't do that," he says, almost four months after the tremors. "I felt so helpless being out of the country that I looked for another way to help."
Bastidas decided to create a portal called "Desaparecidos Terremoto Venezuela".
"The main idea was that there would be at least one place where people could record these stories (about their family members) and start to get in touch with each other."
For almost four months, the page received 82,610 records of missing people.
After purifying the data and eliminating duplications with the help of volunteers who verify the information, the portal counts at least 29,486 people who have not yet been contacted.
There is no way to know for sure what happened to these people, since, to date, the Venezuelan government has not released a list of the missing or created an official channel to register these cases.
Another independent platform called Venezuela Reporta estimates, based on records received from citizens, that there are 41,357 uncontacted people.
"I feel outraged because the government has the resources to estimate the number of missing people, search for them and provide verified information to the population, and it doesn't do so," says Bastidas.
Asked about the lack of numbers on July 11, the president of the Venezuelan National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, stated: "We cannot be based on speculation, but on reality."
On August 4, the governor of the State of La Guaira, José Alejandro Terán, said there were 1,579 missing.
With the help of Claude, Anthropic's artificial intelligence tool, Bastidas designed and published the website four and a half hours after the earthquakes.
"At first I had no idea of the extent of the damage. I only found out about it a few hours later, when I was already working on the tool", he says, from Buenos Aires.
Initially, the portal offered a registration form that included the photo of the missing person, their name and surname, the details of the person registering and their telephone number, as well as the date and place of last contact.
All records were added to a database built with AI. Bastidas assigned different engineering functions to the tool so they could work in parallel.
“Artificial intelligence acted as the platform’s programming team,” he explains.
In the early hours of June 25, Jorge sent the link to his initiative to relatives, friends and acquaintances. A friend shared the project on her social networks, and the programmer realized that the platform was working.
"There came a time when the traffic was so high that the page went offline and I had to change the entire infrastructure to make it more robust."
That day saw "the highest peak" in traffic: around 800,000 users, a volume that Bastidas did not expect.
The next day, information began to arrive that had little to do with the missing people.
"We started receiving joke registrations, memes, so to speak: people registering Nicolás Maduro, Delcy Rodríguez or Diosdado Cabello on the platform."
In response to this content, it tightened restrictions on what data could be entered into the portal, blocked certain "name patterns," and added a moderation panel as well as the option to report content.
"Many people followed the page and, when they saw information that did not correspond to reality, they made a report. They even sent nude photos, so we implemented filters to prevent this type of content from continuing to arrive."
On Thursday, June 25, Bastidas was contacted by LAB-CO, an innovation laboratory operating in Mexico, which offered him a facial recognition model capable of comparing portraits of people registered as missing.
Venezuelan economist Santiago Rosas, co-founder of LAB-CO, explained to BBC Mundo that the facial recognition tool was based on identIA, an AI model that facilitates the identification of deceased people through their tattoos.
"Before the earthquakes, it was already being used by forensic services in several states in Mexico and Guatemala", says Rosas. "What we did was adapt it specifically for the Venezuelan case."
During the first two weeks after the earthquakes, the facial recognition section was visited by 19,000 users, according to Google Analytics.
"It was the second tool with the highest traffic in the first few days", highlights Bastidas. "We could see that people were using it to check if their family member was there and search more quickly, or to see if they could recognize people", including in hospitals.
The images also helped eliminate duplicate records.
While Jorge handled the operation of the page from his computer, Daneli Hernández mobilized his contacts in Venezuela to obtain direct information about the victims.
The Venezuelan lawyer, who lives in Argentina and has collaborated with Bastidas for years, saw on social media that handwritten lists of people who had arrived at hospitals were circulating.
She contacted family and friends who worked in health units and asked them to obtain these records to compare them with the missing persons files registered on the page.
“The doctors did everything they could to try to obtain these lists and disseminate the information,” says Hernández. "Obviously, no hospital is prepared to deal with the amount of information they were receiving."
A team of 15 to 20 people dedicated themselves to transcribing these lists onto computers. They then cross-referenced the data to purify it and identify whether there were names repeated in different listings.
Once the lists were merged, they uploaded this information to the website to identify who could be marked as found.
Hernández states that they obtained more than 3,000 records, from almost all hospitals in Caracas and La Guaira.
“We felt a great responsibility to try to help people find themselves again,” he says. "When we started getting reports of people who had died, it was a really hard blow because we knew they weren't going to return to their families."
Alceo Angelini was one of thousands of users who registered a relative on the platform created by Jorge Bastidas.
During the two days in which no one had information about his cousin's whereabouts in La Guaira, he remembers that his only hope was to register him on independent search portals.
"The only way we had to register the disappearance were these tools that emerged on the initiative of civil society, because we did not receive any communication from the government", says Alceo.
Although his cousin reappeared on his own, he says registering him "was helpful, at least for us, to have peace of mind about putting him somewhere, that someone was helping us."
"He told me that he arrived at a place, someone recognized him and got scared because they had seen him missing on one of the platforms", recalls Alceo.
When speaking with BBC Mundo, he visited Jorge's portal and found that his cousin still appeared as "not yet in contact".
Jorge Bastidas attributes the failure to the fact that each change to the records needs to be reviewed and the team of volunteers responsible for this task is reduced.
The page suffered two attacks during the first days it was online. In one of them, 15 thousand records were changed, explains Bastidas, owner of Software Empire.
"We reestablished the original records because we have a daily backup of the database. But there was information that we actually lost, around 1,200 records."
Furthermore, he reports that the platform has received attacks from bots. These episodes forced the team to "further limit information editing and implement more security controls."
To advance the verification tasks, Bastidas plans to open a call center to contact all available numbers in its platform's database and confirm each of the records displayed on the page.
"We shouldn't wait for the State to act," he says. "We still don't know the extent of the damage. I'll feel satisfied when I can tell people, 'This is what we have.'"
