CATIA LA MAR, Venezuela (AFP) — Hundreds of rescuers struggled Thursday to unearth a 43-year-old Venezuelan man trapped for eight days under a collapsed building after twin earthquakes killed almost 2,300 people, an Agence France-Presse (AFP) reporter witnessed.

An international rescue team inched closer to Hernan Gil, a security guard buried inside his booth under the seven-story building where he worked in Catia La Mar, a coastal area almost entirely razed to the ground in the 24 June catastrophe.

“This is truly a miracle,” Gil’s wife Gusbimar Gonzalez told AFP.

“I’m completely amazed because it’s the first time I’ve seen so many countries come together like this to save a single person,” she said.

Rescue teams from seven countries — Venezuela, Chile, the United States, Portugal, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Mexico — have been working around-the-clock over the past three days to reach him.

They were almost one meter from his position overnight, rescuers told AFP, but working carefully to avoid the further collapse of nearby structures damaged in the quakes.

“This is a rather complicated structure to access,” Cristian Vera, the leader of the Chilean rescue team told AFP. “It wasn’t easy to reach the exact spot where the victim was located.”

Though hopes rose for one man’s rescue, Venezuela faces a disaster that has left many without shelter and desperately short on food. In addition to the dead, tens of thousands of people remain unaccounted for.

Venezuela’s interim president Delcy Rodriguez declared seven days of mourning, saying the country’s “soul is torn apart by the human losses.”

The majority of collapsed buildings in the hardest-hit city of La Guaira, just north of Caracas, have been marked with the letter “D” for “deceased” — a sign they had been searched with no signs of life found.

“Time isn’t wasted in a place where there is no expectation of recovering people alive,” said Javier Rodes, the coordinator of a Spanish rescue team whose sniffer dog Nala searched in vain through the rubble for traces of life.

There have been miracle survivors, such as a three-year-old boy found alive Tuesday, six days after Venezuela’s most powerful quake in over a century.