Disaster Humanitarian · Ordinary People
Jorge Bastidas didn't wait for the government. He and his team built the missing-persons list in three hours.
Jorge Bastidas · Buenos Aires, Argentina (built for Venezuela, after the June 2026 earthquakes)
After twin earthquakes hit Venezuela and official reports stalled, a 31-year-old programmer in Buenos Aires built a citizen-run missing-persons tracker. He says he and a team of six had it running in three hours, and that it took in more than 30,000 reports in its first two days.
The person and the place
Jorge Bastidas is a 31-year-old Venezuelan programmer living in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The problem Jorge cared about
Twin earthquakes struck northern Venezuela on June 24, 2026. Families searching for missing loved ones needed answers, and the government's official reporting was slow to arrive.
The agency moment
Bastidas decided not to wait for an official response. "Who knew when the government was going to respond? We decided to take action," he said. Working with Claude Opus 4.8 and donated facial-recognition software, he says he and a team of six built Desaparecidos Terremoto Venezuela, a citizen-run missing-persons tracker, in three hours. Without AI, "it would have taken me about 24 hours without rest to build something that took me three hours," he said.
What changed
In its first two days online, Bastidas told Rest of World, the site took in more than 30,000 reports of missing people.
The move worth copying
He didn't wait for a press release or a permission slip. He opened his laptop the night his country needed it and built the thing himself. If something where you live needs a list nobody is making, three hours is less time than you think.
"Who knew when the government was going to respond? We decided to take action." — Jorge Bastidas, Rest of World
Sources
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Curated by Good in Progress from the public record.
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