Venezuela’s revolutionary socialist government has withstood uprisings, international isolation and the removal of its leader Nicolás Maduro by US forces. But it is now facing its sternest challenge as anger mounts over its inadequate response to Wednesday’s double earthquake.
Delcy Rodríguez, the life-long socialist who the Trump administration backed to lead Venezuela following Maduro’s ousting, was heckled by survivors in Caracas, the capital, as she surveyed the rescue effort at a collapsed 22-storey tower on Friday.
“Get out,” they shouted.
In the devastated La Guaira state just north of the capital, displaced residents were forced to haul chunks of rubble by hand in the hope of rescuing those still trapped, four days after the ground was shaken by 7.2 and 7.5-magnitude earthquakes.
“We’ll have to move in with relatives because if this government has its way we won’t even have a place to take shelter,” said Victor Arroyo, whose son remains trapped in his home after it partially collapsed on Wednesday evening.
Since the earthquakes, Arroyo has been sleeping on the street outside the building with his neighbours, who have posted photographs of their missing family members at the building’s entrance hoping for “a miracle” that they will be found alive.
The extent of the human and economic devastation is not yet clear. The death toll rose to 1,450 on Sunday, according to Venezuelan officials, and is expected to climb higher.
Initial reports by UN agencies estimate the earthquake caused about $6.7bn worth of damage and affected up to 6.76mn people, including 2mn in Caracas. The Venezuelan government said 189 buildings had collapsed while 585 were partially damaged, with 38 hospitals needing repairs.
Analysts say the response has exposed the shortfalls of a regime that over 27 years hollowed out much of the Venezuelan state’s capacity to respond.
“The interim government led by Delcy Rodríguez has shown that, more than 72 hours after the disaster struck, it was unable to respond as it should have,” said Edward Rodríguez, an opposition-aligned Venezuelan political analyst.
“The response has been marked by a lack of planning and leadership in handling emergencies, complete improvisation and armed forces that spent years preparing to repress the population rather than to help it in times of crisis.”
When Hugo Chávez launched his so-called “Bolivarian Revolution” after winning the presidency in 1999, he oversaw a massive reorganisation of Venezuela. Underwritten by high oil rents, he spent heavily on social housing and medical programmes while hollowing out the country’s institutions.
Corruption surged, and Chávez — a former coup-plotter and army paratrooper — elevated the role of the military in politics as ministries were supplanted by his “Bolivarian missions”.
When Chávez died of cancer in 2013 he was succeeded by Maduro, who expanded his mentor’s repressive apparatus amid an economic collapse that saw GDP contract by three-quarters from 2013 to 2021 and a quarter of the population flee abroad.
Venezuela has resumed relations with the IMF as it seeks to restructure its public debt, which ballooned under Maduro and Chávez. The country is set to reveal a $240bn debt pile, making it the largest sovereign restructuring in history, the FT has reported.
Orlando Pérez, a professor of political science at the University of North Texas at Dallas, said the legacy of Chavismo — as Chávez’s movement is known — was on display in the response to last week’s earthquakes.
“The disaster has revealed the consequences of more than two decades of institutional degradation: Firefighters without proper equipment, hospitals overwhelmed with patients lying on the floor, and buildings that pancaked because construction codes were never enforced or ignored,” Pérez said.
“The resources were there but they went elsewhere, some to corruption and others to coup-proofing the regime.”
It is not the first time that Chavismo and La Guaira have been tested by a natural disaster.
In 1999, just eleven months after Chávez took office, La Guaira was struck by mudslides that killed up to 30,000 people, burying homes and sweeping infrastructure into the Caribbean Sea.
Amid mass criticism over his flat-footed response, Chávez rejected US assistance, which his biographers said was at the advice of his communist ally in Havana, Fidel Castro.
Today, observers see parallels with that tragedy, even if this time the government has welcomed $150mn in US support.
Ricardo Hausmann, a Venezuelan former minister in the 1990s and now a professor at Harvard, said there is “indignation” with “the regime and the missing-in-action armed forces”, who he said are “trying to repress volunteers rather than orient them”.
“Delcy has not attempted to unite and rally the country,” Hausmann said. “Instead she has prioritised regime stability over rescue operations.”
Ángel Rángel Sánchez, who ran Venezuela’s emergency response agency during the 1999 tragedy, also blasted the military’s response to the current crisis after years of focusing on quashing dissent.
“Their operational priorities were shifted over the last 15 years towards internal security, on the assumption that the state’s greatest threat was public protests,” said Rángel Sánchez, adding that procurement prioritised water cannons for dispersing protesters over equipping firefighters.
In La Guaira, several of Chavismo’s signature social housing projects, alongside hotel towers, were levelled by the earthquakes. Rángel Sánchez said that when those projects were built more than two decades ago, Chávez’s government blocked engineers from inspecting their construction standards.
“If we tried to take pictures, we were threatened with jail,” he said.
In districts and cities across La Guaira many streets are cracked and fissured, with the remains of collapsed buildings blocking roads and traffic into the province grinding to a standstill.
Now-homeless survivors stand in winding queues for food, water and medicine, while volunteers distribute the supplies. The stench of decomposing bodies hangs heavily in the air.
Only at a handful of spots were state rescue teams visible, with civilian organisations working to pick up the slack. The government on Friday declared La Guaira a disaster zone, restricting access to the state.
“Everyone here started digging with their bare hands,” said one volunteer rescuer. “If it hadn’t been for us and the people themselves, the situation would be even worse.”
The disaster response comes amid political upheaval in Venezuela following Maduro’s ousting.
The Trump administration has backed Rodríguez to open up the country’s hydrocarbons and mining sectors to private investment in exchange for a partial unwinding of “maximum pressure” economic sanctions imposed during the first Trump administration.
Washington has also taken over management of Venezuelan oil sales, which, while rising, have been marked by a lack of transparency, analysts say.
Despite Trump’s recent claims that Venezuelans are “dancing in the streets” in a show of support for his actions in the country, many are souring on Washington’s involvement in their country and growing frustrated with the slow pace of a political transition.
The Trump administration said before the earthquake that elections will take place once Venezuela and its economy have been stabilised.
Maduro claimed victory in a 2024 election in which the opposition’s main leader, María Corina Machado, was banned from running. An independently verified vote tally carried out by the opposition found that Machado’s stand-in candidate, Edmundo González, was the true winner. Both Machado and González are in exile.
Machado, who is living in Washington and won last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, is reported to be weighing a return to Venezuela in the wake of the disaster.
“No one is dancing in the streets. They are digging through rubble, burying their dead, and searching for the missing,” Pedro Burelli, an opposition figure close to Machado, wrote on X. “Millions of people in Venezuela have seen little change since the brilliant military operation that removed Maduro from power.”
On the streets of La Guaira, many locals worked on rescue efforts, as international crews from the EU and countries inclduing El Salvador and Mexico began arriving in Venezuela.
“It’s been very difficult, but we can’t just stand by and do nothing,” said Liuska Escobar, whose family remains trapped under rubble, as she wiped a film of dust from her brow. “We won’t stay here with our arms folded.”
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