Days after a powerful earthquake struck Venezuela, survivors and bodies were still being pulled from the rubble. BBC News reported the story of a young girl trapped for 32 hours who survived by eating ketchup and cheese she found in the wreckage — a detail that, in its specificity, captured something about the broader collapse: people surviving on whatever scraps remain. The Guardian noted that President Nicolás Maduro’s administration was mounting a defence of its emergency response even as the body count was expected to rise significantly. The government’s posture — defensive, self-congratulatory, alert to criticism before alert to rescue — was itself a data point about the institutional culture that shapes disaster response.
The received wisdom
The standard progressive account of Venezuelan suffering focuses on the role of American sanctions in compounding the country’s economic collapse. There is genuine validity to this argument: successive rounds of US sanctions on Venezuelan oil exports have unquestionably reduced government revenue and contributed to the shortages of medicine, food, and basic services that afflict ordinary Venezuelans. The humanitarian consequences of prolonged sanctions regimes deserve serious scrutiny.
On this reading, the earthquake response is another chapter in the same story: a government operating with depleted resources, cut off from international finance markets, unable to import the heavy rescue equipment it needs. The international community’s first responsibility, on this view, is to remove the structural barriers — sanctions, debt obligations, financial exclusion — that prevent Venezuela from functioning as a normal state capable of protecting its citizens.
This framing has the merit of acknowledging real costs. But it cannot explain everything.
A different read
The Venezuelan state began failing long before the most intensive rounds of US sanctions took effect. Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999 presiding over a country with substantial oil wealth; by the time sanctions were tightened in 2017, Venezuela had already experienced years of food shortages, collapsing healthcare infrastructure, and mass emigration of professionals. The correlation between Bolivarian socialism’s policy choices — price controls, nationalisation, destruction of independent institutions, currency manipulation — and institutional collapse is too consistent to be dismissed as externally imposed.
Natural disasters are, in a precise sense, stress tests of state capacity. They reveal what exists beneath the surface of official performance. Japan, Chile, and New Zealand have built earthquake response systems that function because they invested across decades in building codes, professional emergency services, independent civil institutions, and non-corrupt procurement systems. Venezuela, across 25 years of Chavista governance, dismantled precisely these institutional layers. The oil sector was staffed with political loyalists rather than engineers. The judiciary was subordinated to executive power. Civil society organisations were harassed and suppressed. The result is a state that, when tested, reaches for rhetoric rather than resources.
The Guardian’s coverage of government spokespeople defending the response before the count was complete illustrated this dynamic precisely. The priority, even in disaster, was political management. This is not a feature of states that have been sanctioned — it is a feature of states that have been politically captured.
The deeper problem is that Venezuela’s crisis has become a kind of ideological Rorschach test. Those on the left see American imperialism; those on the right see socialism’s inevitable failure. Both framings contain partial truths and miss the specific institutional mechanisms through which state capacity is destroyed. What matters for the people trapped under rubble is not which geopolitical narrative is more satisfying but whether heavy rescue equipment reaches them within 72 hours. On that metric, the Venezuelan state has failed — and the reasons are structural, not circumstantial.
There is also a regional dimension. Venezuela’s collapse has produced one of the largest refugee crises in the Western Hemisphere, with millions of Venezuelans in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and beyond. The earthquake will accelerate internal displacement. The international community’s response capacity — already strained by commitments in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan — will be tested again.
What to watch
- Whether international rescue teams are granted access — the Maduro government’s track record on accepting international humanitarian assistance is poor.
- The final death and displacement toll, which will determine whether the earthquake crosses the threshold of an acute political crisis for Maduro.
- The response of Colombia and other neighbouring states absorbing Venezuelan refugees, and whether the earthquake prompts renewed regional diplomatic engagement.
- Whether the disaster creates any domestic political opening for the Venezuelan opposition, or whether the government successfully manages the narrative.
— J