By Alberto Fajardo, Mayela Armas and Julia Symmes Cobb
CARACAS/CATIA LA MAR/LA GUAIRA, Venezuela, July 2 (Reuters) - Venezuela's Interim President Delcy Rodriguez vehemently denied on Thursday that her government reacted too slowly to destruction caused by two earthquakes which devastated the country's northern coast, killing more than 2,000 people, after days of widespread criticism of the official response effort.
"It was a natural tragedy on a scale we never imagined, even though we knew that a seismic event could occur in our country," Rodriguez said in her first press conference since taking power in January after the U.S. ouster of Nicolas Maduro. "We did not wait one, two or three days. We acted immediately."
Rodriguez said her government issued an emergency decree to activate civil protection and emergency protocols within hours of the tremors, which struck last Wednesday at 7.2- and 7.5-magnitudes, less than a minute apart.
She also said nearly all the regional officials in La Guaira - the coastal state that was hardest-hit - perished in buildings that were reduced to rubble.
She put the rising death toll at 2,595, and said the government was not yet ending its search and rescue efforts.
"We can still find people alive," she told a room packed with dozens of international journalists.
Rodriguez did not detail the number of people who are still missing. The number of people still unaccounted for on an unofficial but widely used online list was down to some 38,500 on Thursday evening, after peaking at nearly 60,000 in the days immediately after the quakes.
State television has regularly shown Rodriguez meeting with military and security officials while groups of soldiers and police have been patrolling major roads in La Guaira and sometimes directing traffic.
Still, the response to the disaster has been led by civilians, many of them volunteers.
Victims of the quakes have spent days trying to dig out loved ones with their hands, shovels and pickaxes, assisted by firefighters, civil protection corps, thousands of members of foreign rescue teams, student doctors and nurses, civilians who normally work as teachers and veterinarians and occasionally, a soldier.
Soldiers working for days alongside civilians in the six collapsed towers of a major public housing project in La Guaira told Reuters they had volunteered to help there.
Many rescuers have decried a lack of heavy machinery needed to move huge slabs of concrete.
(Reporting by Julia Symmes Cobb in Caracas, Alberto Fajardo in Catia La Mar and Mayela Armas in La Guaira; additional reporting by Vivian Sequera, Deisy Buitrago, Iñigo Alexander, Marianna Parraga and Jennifery Rigby; Writing by Cassandra Garrison and Daina Beth Solomon; editing by Deepa Babington and Rod Nickel)
