"The rivers just overflowed and we were trapped. The only way out was by helicopter," said Milkos Kato, one of scores of stranded tourists ferried to the airport from a vacation complex left without electricity or roads for two days.

Civil Protection rescue officials said as many as 6,000 vacationers and residents were trapped along the coast near Caracas where residents flock from the capital to private vacation clubs and public beaches along the Caribbean.

Five people have died in Caracas and nine in western Carabobo State, including a mother and her five children who were buried in their home by a landslide.

The oil sector of Venezuela, the world's No. 5 crude exporter and a top supplier to the United States, has not been affected by the floods.

President Hugo Chavez, who has declared an emergency in six states and the capital, toured La Guaira region where he said at least 5,000 people were rescued by Thursday.

Authorities set up shelters for residents whose homes had been swept away and crews worked to clear the roads and bridges washed away by overflowing rivers.

Cheers greeted Chavez as he met with residents asking for help. But some in the poor barrios around La Guaira in Vargas state, who suffered the most in the 1999 disaster, felt abandoned by the populist leader.

"What are we going to solve with a wave goodbye," said one woman waiting for aid at the state governor's office as Chavez waved from a jeep sluicing through ankle-deep mud.

Wrecked skeletons of buildings still stand as testimony to the tragedy in Vargas state in 1999 when rivers of mud and rock tumbled down onto coastal villages, burying many residents alive and washing others out to sea.

Critics say Chavez's government has done little to rebuild the areas hit in 1999.

In El Colorado, a ramshackle neighborhood of breeze-block homes packed onto a hillside, residents complained the government had not lived up to promises to build new houses or provide assistance.

Muddy water poured down rickety stone stairways, where piles of earth and bricks mark recent land slips.

"We've been like this since 1999. No one has come to help us out," said Maria Romero whose neighbors were sweeping out mud and water from their homes. "We're not sleeping because we are scared the mountain is going to come down on top of us."