Angelica Mundrain has spent six days staring at the rubble that entombed her son, niece and nephew, waiting for heavy machinery that never comes. "We've been abandoned," she said outside her flattened beachfront apartment in La Guaira. "We feel helpless. What we have seen is a lack of organization, a lack of empathy, a lack of everything."
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. Thousands more people remain missing. Rescuers continue to pull some survivors from the rubble, but the chances of finding people alive are fading with each passing hour.
A Government Unable to Respond
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. 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. Police officers, intelligence agents and members of the armed forces manned intersections while survivors dug through concrete with their bare hands.
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. Men and women in Venezuelan uniforms stood watching. State workers took selfies.
Decades of Institutional Collapse
Tulane University professor David Smilde, who has studied Venezuela for three decades, said the disaster showed that the stunning capture of then-President Nicolas Maduro by U.S. forces earlier this year was not a one-off in which the Venezuelan state was unable to defend itself. "It also can't do anything like get started with digging people out," he said. 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. Many people on the government payroll haven't worked in months or years. 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," he said. "You're not sure who's going to be the pitcher, who's going to be catching, and who's going to be outfielder."
Inequality Shapes Who Gets Rescued
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.
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.
"The Government Did Nothing"
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." He contrasted members of Venezuela's National Guard with dust-covered civilians and foreign rescuers who had dug through rubble for days. "The government did nothing."
Why This Matters:
The collapse of Venezuela's earthquake response reveals what happens when public institutions are hollowed out by corruption, underpayment and neglect. Nearly 2,000 people are dead not just because the earth shook, but because the state apparatus meant to protect them couldn't mobilize ambulances, deploy trained rescue teams or coordinate basic emergency services. The disparity in who received help—wealthy families renting private cranes while public housing residents waited for days—shows how institutional failure hits the most vulnerable hardest. As survivors like Mundrain and Castillo wait among the rubble, their testimonies document not just a natural disaster but a governance crisis that has left ordinary Venezuelans to rescue each other while uniformed officials stand idle. The human cost of decades of institutional decay is now measured in bodies that could have been saved.