The United Nations launched an appeal for roughly $300 million to assist 1.3 million people in urgent need of aid in Venezuela after the powerful twin earthquakes that jolted the country last month, while victims and people spared by the destruction flooded relief services run by nongovernmental organizations in the hardest-hit areas.
Who’s Carrying the Load
Mobile kitchens, clinics and field hospitals now dot public spaces in the northern state of La Guaira, where most of the devastation occurred. That’s where ordinary people are lining up for help in schools, sidewalks, parks, plazas and other public spaces after the back-to-back earthquakes killed 3,889 people, collapsed 190 buildings and damaged 856 others. The government of acting President Delcy Rodríguez has estimated that about 18,000 people were left without a home. The displaced are now living wherever they can. Not by choice.
Irma Echarri, 67, showed up at a mobile unit on a sidewalk across the street from a church with the boxes of eyedrops and pain reliever she usually takes, hoping doctors there could give her new ones. She also wanted to be seen for the pain she developed in her nose after the June 24 earthquakes. “It hurts a lot,” Echarri said while waiting to be seen. “It hurts because it hurts.”
Zulbey Reyes, who was also robbed by the earthquakes of her job as a nanny, went to the clinic run by the Venezuela-based organization Paluz in partnership with the global relief agency International Rescue Committee. Reyes sought treatment for the onset of chest pain. “I thought it was my heart that was sick,” Reyes, 41, said after being diagnosed and receiving medication. “But it’s a nerve that became inflamed after the screams that day.”
What the Damage Looks Like
Doctors treating people in Catia La Mar reported an increase in skin conditions and diarrheal diseases, along with requests for medications for chronic illnesses, including diabetes and high blood pressure. The emerging diseases can be tied to crowded living spaces and poor water and sanitation conditions, which in many communities predate the earthquakes. The disaster didn’t create every problem. It just ripped the cover off them.
Armando Denegri, representative in Venezuela of the Pan-American Health Organization, told reporters Thursday that “50% of the health professionals in La Guaira were directly affected” by the earthquakes. “Some disappeared, some died, others were severely affected by the crisis, impacting their families,” Denegri said without giving further details. When half the people meant to treat the wounded are themselves hit, the hierarchy of disaster gets plain fast.
Fletcher, the head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told The Associated Press during his visit to Venezuela, “It is clear at displacement sites that, particularly after two weeks, that people are turning up because they haven’t been able to get their other treatments. So, they’re not turning up with just the fractures now, they’re turning up with those longer-term health needs. And it’s vital that we’re there for them.”
Who Gets to Help, and Who Gets Repressed
Fletcher said the United States has so far provided most of the earthquake-response aid. Much of the assistance on the ground is being delivered by local groups that have partnered with global humanitarian organizations. That’s the real machinery here: local people doing the work, global institutions taking credit, and the biggest state power in the mix supplying most of the aid.
The widespread presence of nongovernmental organizations in the country and the freedom with which the government is allowing them to operate contrasts with the repression and persecution to which they were subjected in recent years. While Rodríguez served as vice president to former President Nicolás Maduro, organizations were repeatedly accused of anti-government activities and the U.N. local human rights office expelled. Now the same apparatus that squeezed them is letting them back in, because crisis has a way of forcing even hard-edged political theater to make room for survival.
Among the displaced, the need is immediate and blunt. People are showing up for eyedrops, pain reliever, chest pain, and chronic medication. They’re also showing up because their homes are gone, their jobs are gone, or both. The government says 18,000 people lost housing. The U.N. says 1.3 million need urgent aid. Those numbers sit on top of each other like a ledger of abandonment.
Fletcher said, “When you have a crisis of this magnitude, people put the politics to one side and are able to focus on saving as many lives as possible, and that’s what I’m seeing so far in this response.” The politics, though, never really left. They’re just standing off to the side while people wait in line for medicine, water, and a place to sleep.