A powerful earthquake struck Venezuela’s coastal La Guaira region, killing dozens and leaving survivors to fend for themselves for days in the rubble of collapsed apartment buildings. The human toll has been compounded by what residents and international observers describe as a catastrophically slow and disorganised government response. Rescuers worked to find survivors under collapsed buildings in La Guaira, the port city that serves as Caracas’s main coastal outlet, while the government of Nicolás Maduro staged photo opportunities at command centres rather than deploying meaningful search-and-rescue capacity. A three-year-old child was pulled from rubble six days after the quake, the survival a miracle that highlighted how long survivors had been waiting. Meanwhile, Venezuelans whom the United States had deported hours before the earthquake struck remain missing, having arrived in a country whose emergency services could not cope.
The received wisdom
The humanitarian and progressive framing of this disaster is, predictably, centred on American culpability. US deportation flights that landed hours before the earthquake delivered people into a zone of catastrophe; critics have demanded accountability for that timing. More broadly, the sanctions regime that Washington has maintained against Venezuela for years is regularly invoked as a contributing cause of the country’s infrastructure decay: if the government cannot import spare parts for civil defence equipment, if the oil revenues that would fund emergency services have been cut off, then external coercion bears some share of the responsibility for what happens when the earth moves.
This argument is not entirely without merit. Sanctions do impose costs on civilian populations, and the Trump administration’s maximum-pressure posture has at times seemed more interested in regime humiliation than in a coherent strategy for political transition. Human rights lawyers have raised genuinely important questions about the legal obligations owed to deportees who are sent into active disaster zones.
A different read
And yet the sanctions explanation for Venezuela’s collapsed emergency capacity requires us to forget a quarter-century of deliberate state destruction that predates the most severe sanctions by many years. Hugo Chávez began dismantling Venezuela’s meritocratic civil service in the early 2000s, replacing professional administrators with political loyalists. The oil boom of the mid-2000s, rather than being invested in infrastructure, was spent on social programmes designed to maximise political dependency and electoral loyalty. When oil prices collapsed in 2014, the infrastructure deficit became impossible to conceal. Aftershocks continued to fray nerves among residents who had already been left to manage alone — not because of American sanctions but because the Venezuelan state had been hollowed out from within over twenty years.
The specific failure in earthquake response is particularly instructive. Venezuela, sitting on the Caribbean tectonic plate, is a seismically active country. Building codes, civil defence protocols, and first-responder training are not luxuries — they are basic functions of governance in an earthquake zone. The collapse of residential buildings in La Guaira reflects not just the force of the quake but the years of deferred maintenance, corruption in construction contracts, and the gutting of the agencies that would normally enforce safety standards. This is not a story that begins with American sanctions. It is a story about what happens to a state after two decades of resource extraction for political ends.
The deportation timing is a separate and genuinely troubling issue that deserves its own accounting. The United States government knew the earthquake had struck; the decision to proceed with or not to halt flights in those hours is a matter of record that will be examined. But conflating that administrative failure with the deeper structural failure of Venezuelan governance allows Maduro to do what authoritarian leaders always do with natural disasters: blame external forces for internal dysfunction.
Angry Venezuelans in La Guaira were not, in the immediate aftermath, calling for the lifting of sanctions. They were demanding to know where their government was. That distinction matters. The most honest accounting of this disaster assigns primary responsibility to a political system that has treated its citizens as instruments of regime survival rather than as people who deserve competent governance. Foreign pressure — whether punitive American sanctions or the international community’s decades of appeasement of Chavismo in the name of anti-imperialism — is a secondary factor that cannot bear the explanatory weight the left wishes to assign it.
What to watch
- Death toll trajectory: As search and rescue operations wind down, the final casualty count will be a political measure of response capacity; significantly higher numbers than initial reports will increase domestic pressure on Maduro.
- Diaspora political mobilisation: Venezuela’s large emigrant communities in Colombia, Spain, and the United States have historically channelled earthquake disaster into political pressure; watch for organised responses from exile groups.
- US-Venezuela migration nexus: The deported migrants caught in the disaster zone will become a test case for how US courts handle the legal duty of care in deportation proceedings.
- Construction sector accountability: Whether any investigation into building standard violations is launched — or buried — will be a telling indicator of whether any rule of law survives in Venezuela’s administrative state.
— J