Two weeks after twin earthquakes struck Venezuela, people are still clawing with their bare hands at the massive concrete columns that crushed their family members. Some have set up makeshift tents on top of collapsed homes so they can keep on digging, seemingly inured to the smell of decomposing bodies, some partially exposed.

Only, now, the objective has changed.

“There are no survivors here,” said Víctor José Calderón Castillo, who said he lost about 20 family members in the quakes. He was sitting on top of the remains of a building where he believed three were still buried. “We are looking for bodies,” he said.

The grinding search through mountains of rubble, after back-to-back earthquakes flattened entire residential buildings along Venezuela’s northern coast, most in the state of La Guaira, has never stopped.

The government has confirmed nearly 3,700 dead, but the scale of the destruction and the shortage of equipment to remove the debris mean that thousands of people are still unaccounted for.

So while the desperate searches early on were punctuated by miracle rescues, with each passing day, a hellish landscape trapping unknown numbers of crushed corpses is hardening into an everyday reality.

Many international search and rescue teams have left, but large numbers of family members remain at crumbled sites.

After complaining that the government did little to help them rescue relatives in the first, critical hours, they now fear that officials will tear down damaged buildings and remove rubble without any care for bodies.

So the same frenzied determination that drove the relatives’ search for survivors has now turned to pulling out the dead.

Sitting on top of the rubble of a destroyed building in La Guaira, Breykel Rosas, 27, was collecting bones he believed belonged to his niece’s cousin, an 11-year-old boy.

He stored them in a light blue cotton pillowcase, then began striking a massive column of concrete with a sledgehammer. He was still looking for his 5-year-old niece who had also lived in the building. She would have turned 6 on Wednesday.

Next to him was Orange Castillo, 23, a tall, burly man clutching his brother’s old teddy bear. “I have my little brother here,” he said, pointing at the tangled mass of debris on which he was standing, and where he thought his 18-year-old brother was trapped.

A few feet away, a group of young men hiked down the rubble carrying a white body bag containing two bodies. Another group of men followed shortly after with another two-person body bag.

Along La Guaira’s waterfront, on every pile of debris or partially destroyed building, there were clusters of men, patiently sawing through rebar inside concrete, slowly chipping away at the mass of ruin.

They are digging on the lower floors of tall buildings tilted so steeply it looks like they could collapse at any second. Amid warnings of a potential sanitary crisis, people use their surgical masks to wipe away tears.

“The fear is completely gone,” said Gregorio Torres, 41, who wore a cast after breaking his arm digging through rubble where he said his wife and 15-year-old son were buried. “When you are looking for your family you have no fear.”

Balanced on debris often dangerously close to huge cranes combing through the wreckage, Venezuelans talked to each other constantly, describing the layout of apartments to provide clues on where to dig for bodies.

They discussed the final moments of a life before the earth began to shake. A play date, a soccer game on TV — each memory became a hint where to look.

In the seaside town of Catia La Mar, a meeting taking place the day of the quakes in a tall waterfront apartment meant it was likely that 20 bodies could be found on the ground floor, said Esteban Marín, 33, who was looking for two relatives inside.

So far, only a single hand was visible through the debris.

Dayana Delgado’s 8-year-old son, Brayner, was playing basketball on a court when a building collapsed onto it. For the first few days, Ms. Delgado said she spent every hour digging through the rubble. It was the only way, she added, to keep the anguish at bay.

Now she was living in a makeshift encampment in front of the pile of debris that had likely crushed the boy as cranes combed through it.

“I am swimming, swimming, swimming and I am drowning myself,” she said. “I want them to find his body, so this nightmare can be over.”

Hundreds of newly homeless people sat under trees or beneath sheets stretched out to block the sun, just a few feet away from the collapsed buildings. They had stopped working, their lives reduced to sitting through the rain, the many aftershocks, and the constant thrumming of crane engines — watching, seemingly hypnotized, the search for proof that their relatives were dead.

Many said they were afraid that if bodies were pulled out without them there, nobody would identify them.

“I want to recover his little body so it doesn’t go to a mass grave,” said José Manuel Diaz, Brayner’s father. But, he admitted, “Staying here is horrifying.”

A few miles away, in the town of Caraballeda, a crane dug around the partially visible body of María Liendo’s brother-in-law. She held a permanent marker to write his name on a body bag so he would not get mixed up with others at the morgue.

“It’s him, 100 percent,” she said, describing his unmistakable tooth, blackened from smoking cigars. Nonetheless, she added, “My family still doesn’t want to believe this.”

Through the fog brought on by long sleepless nights, some Venezuelans said they were convinced they could still hear their family members calling for them. Videos of miracle rescues circulating on social media became a reason to hope — and to criticize the heavy machinery shifting roughly through the rubble, potentially harming anyone left alive.

“We always go down there, we yell for them, we call them by name: ‘Are you there? Answer us.’ But so far, we haven’t had a response,” said Marry Alexander Escobar, 46. He said four family members were buried in an apartment building in La Guaira.

Even after a priest and a group of nuns prayed for the dead at building sites in La Guaira on Tuesday, some survivors held on to a mixture of hope and delusion.

“The mourning makes them hear things,” said Salatiel Slongo Kloss, a Brazilian firefighter who had come to help. His colleague, Jefferson Navarro, a firefighter from Paraguay, said that they were most likely hallucinations. “Starting from now it’s basically impossible to find survivors,” he said.

Emergency responders shared these grim conclusions in a whisper, however, not wanting to crush the hopes of waiting families.

Still, the dwindling rescue efforts were visible. Deninson Quijada, 39, a Venezuelan firefighter, said his bosses had ordered him to move on from rescues.

“It’s not worth it,” he said. “We can’t do anything anymore.”