Powerful back-to-back earthquakes struck Venezuela on June 25, collapsing buildings in the capital Caracas and triggering aftershocks across the country. The Guardian reported tremors severe enough to bring down structures in what remains one of the Western Hemisphere’s most mismanaged major capitals. Emergency services were deployed, but communications and coordination difficulties immediately emerged — a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched Venezuela’s public infrastructure degrade over the past decade. The full death toll and structural damage assessment were still being compiled as reports came in, but the images of collapsed residential buildings in a city that was once among South America’s most prosperous told a story beyond seismology. Natural disasters do not discriminate; but they do reveal the accumulated consequences of governance choices.
The received wisdom
The compassionate, and not incorrect, first response to a natural disaster is to set aside politics and focus on the human toll. Earthquakes are not ideological. Venezuela sits on an active seismic zone — the Caribbean Plate meets the South American Plate just offshore — and a serious earthquake was always a geological eventuality regardless of who governed Caracas. On this reading, any analysis that deploys the earthquake as a cudgel against the Maduro government is opportunistic. The more urgent concern is international humanitarian aid: Venezuela’s isolation from major Western financial institutions and the US sanctions regime have complicated the country’s ability to import construction materials, technical expertise, and emergency equipment. If the death toll is high, the argument goes, Washington’s sanctions policy bears some responsibility for the inadequate building stock and emergency infrastructure that made this earthquake more lethal than it needed to be.
A different read
The humanitarian point is real, and the sanctions debate is legitimate — but it should not be allowed to foreclose a harder accounting. Venezuela’s infrastructure crisis long predates the tightening of US sanctions, and it is rooted primarily in the Chavista state’s systematic destruction of the institutions, incentives, and private-sector capacity that maintained the country’s built environment.
The earthquake report from The Guardian describes buildings collapsing in Caracas — but Caracas’s building stock has been deteriorating for years due to a combination of nationalisation of construction companies, collapse of the private real-estate sector, hyperinflation that made material imports impossible, and the exodus of the engineering and technical workforce. Venezuela has lost an estimated seven million emigrants since 2015. That includes the architects, civil engineers, structural inspectors, and emergency planners whose skills are precisely what you need when the earth shakes.
The parallel that comes to mind is Haiti — not because Venezuela is as poor, but because in both cases a structural governance failure converted a seismic event into a human catastrophe far beyond what the geological magnitude would predict. Haiti’s 2010 earthquake was catastrophic partly because Port-au-Prince’s building codes were ignored, unenforced, and ultimately rendered meaningless by a state too corrupt and weak to maintain them. Venezuela has followed a different but equally destructive path: a state that was capable but deliberately dismantled the private and civil institutions that could have provided resilience.
There is also the question of international access. Aid organisations attempting to reach Venezuela have for years faced a government that treats international humanitarian presence as a political threat. USAID operations were expelled; Red Cross access has been periodically restricted. When earthquakes reveal the inadequacy of state capacity, the Maduro government’s instinct is to manage the optics rather than maximise the rescue operation. Whether that instinct will again override the human imperative — and how regional neighbours respond given Colombia’s new right-wing government, which has very different ideas about Venezuelan solidarity — will be a test of regional humanitarian norms.
The deeper lesson for those who believe in the activist state: the capacity to respond to crises must be built in advance, in ordinary times, through the institutional structures — competent bureaucracies, enforceable building codes, functioning private construction sectors — that progressive governments in Latin America have too often regarded as obstacles to transformation rather than preconditions for it. The Bolivarian revolution did not build; it redistributed, then extracted, then watched the stock deplete. The earthquake is the ledger being called.
What to watch
Watch the death toll trajectory over the next 48 hours — the gap between initial and final counts will be a measure of rescue capacity. Track whether the Maduro government accepts international aid teams unconditionally or conditions access on political terms. Observe how Colombia’s new administration responds: De la Espriella has campaigned on a harder line toward Maduro, and his government’s response to a Venezuelan humanitarian crisis will be an early test of whether that hardness is principled or merely rhetorical. Watch the diaspora response — Venezuela’s seven-million-strong diaspora has developed informal remittance and supply networks that often outperform official aid; their mobilisation may matter more than any government’s.
— J