Venezuela’s government has reported 1,943 deaths and more than 10,500 injuries after twin earthquakes measuring 7.2 and 7.5 struck on June 24, while thousands more people remain missing and rescuers continue to pull some survivors from the rubble. The chances of finding people alive are fading with each passing hour.
Who Gets Left in the Rubble
In La Guaira, survivors said the response has been slow, disorganized and uneven. Angelica Mundrain said she wants the bodies of her son, niece and nephew pulled from the rubble of her flattened beachfront apartment and has spent every minute of the past six days waiting for heavy machinery to remove the slabs of concrete and twisted metal that trapped them. She said, “We’ve been abandoned. We feel helpless. What we have seen is a lack of organization, a lack of empathy, a lack of everything.”
That line lands harder than any official briefing. People buried under concrete are waiting while the machinery, the uniforms and the state’s promises move at their own pace. The dead and missing sit at the bottom of a system that can mobilize force, but not care.
The earthquakes have exposed the inability of the party that has ruled Venezuela for 27 years, now with acting President Delcy Rodriguez at the helm, to carry out basic governmental functions, the report said. In the critical 72 hours after residential buildings, food joints, pharmacies, hotels and convenience stores collapsed in La Guaira state, Caracas and surrounding regions, the response focused mainly on directing traffic, with police officers, intelligence agents and members of the armed forces manning intersections.
What the Uniforms Did
Civilians, often on their own and sometimes with foreign rescuers, searched for loved ones among piles of rubble. Ambulances were stuck in miles-long traffic jams. Hospitals were undersupplied and understaffed. Emergency personnel responded with little to no equipment. A week later, many residents in coastal communities of La Guaira said most rescues and recoveries were being carried out by fellow Venezuelans and foreign teams with thermal cameras, sound detectors and trained dogs, while men and women in Venezuelan uniforms stood watching and state workers took selfies.
That’s the hierarchy in plain sight. The people with the tools, the training and the urgency were often outside the official chain, while the apparatus in uniform held intersections and posed for the camera. The people in the rubble did the waiting. The people in charge did the directing.
Tulane University professor David Smilde, who has studied Venezuela for three decades, said the disaster showed that the stunning Jan. 3 capture of then-President Nicolas Maduro by U.S. forces was not a one-off in which the Venezuelan state was unable to defend itself. He said, “It also can’t do anything like get started with digging people out,” and added that this should be a worrying concern for Rodriguez, who was sworn in after Maduro was deposed and taken to New York to face drug trafficking charges.
Smilde said the poor response was linked to the large number of people who have left the public sector because of extremely low pay and corruption, including many people on the government payroll who have not worked in months or years. He said a functioning government needs people with specific duties and emergency protocols, including for earthquakes. “It’s like trying to have a baseball team with three people on the field. You’re not sure who’s going to be the pitcher, who’s going to be catching, and who’s going to be outfielder,” he said.
Who Gets Priority
Wealth and government connections also shaped the response, with some sites getting preferential treatment. At one collapsed building where police and military school students were present, people guessed that officials or politically connected people must have lived there. Police officers from a neighboring state were searching for a captain, while the students and a few members of the national guard were hoping to locate a major general. A telescopic crane was parked for several hours at the entrance, and relatives of the well-off families who lived there were able to rent it. Mundrain said she could not.
That’s the old order in a fresh disaster: access, speed and equipment flow toward the connected, while everyone else waits for scraps of attention. Even in collapse, privilege keeps its line.
People’s anger over the response led to altercations between residents and machine operators. In one case, when a government-provided excavator tried to leave the site of a flattened public housing building, people blocked traffic to keep it in place and pulled the operator from the cab.
Electrician Daniel Castillo said he was able to pull his mother and son alive from their second-floor apartment in a collapsed public housing building in La Guaira just hours after the earthquake struck. His brother’s body remained inside for another day until he could reach him. On Tuesday, while waiting in line for a free bag of hygiene products, including toilet paper and soap, from a tent staffed by the Venezuelan armed forces, he said, “You see the guards, and their uniforms are spotless, not dirty at all,” contrasting members of Venezuela’s National Guard with dust-covered civilians and foreign rescuers who had dug through rubble for days. “The government did nothing.”
The free bag of hygiene products tells its own story. So does the tent staffed by the armed forces. Relief arrives as rationed charity, while the people who actually dig, search and carry the dead do the work the state won’t. The uniforms stay clean. The hands of ordinary people don’t.