Wednesday briefing: After two powerful earthquakes, what is the reality on the ground in Venezuela?
The shaking seemed to come from nowhere.
The shaking seemed to come from nowhere. In a moment captured by fishers off Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, two earthquakes struck seconds apart. Plumes of dust appear where buildings once stood in the recording as the camera rises and falls with the swell. The men rapidly head for the shore in search of their families. “I’m shaking,” says the cameraman.
Since the quakes struck last Wednesday, the search for missing loved ones has not stopped for scores of Venezuelans. Officially, more than 1,700 people have died. But tens of thousands remain missing: desperate relatives are walking up and down streets lined by rubble and collapsed buildings with photos of those they cannot find, asking for help.
One week on, people are still being pulled from the rubble. On Monday, a 21-year-old Aaron Levi Cantillo Vargas was rescued after spending 106 hours trapped under a collapsed building. But with every passing second, hope is fading in a nation that was already fragile due to economic crises, corruption and the capture of its former dictator Nicolás Maduro by US forces earlier this year.
For today on First Edition, I spoke with Clavel Rangel, a Venezuelan journalist, who has been reporting for the Guardian on the earthquake and the desperate search for survivors since it struck. But first, the headlines.
World news | A child has been rescued from the rubble in Venezuela, six days since the country was hit by devastating twin earthquakes.
UK politics | Andy Burnham will have to find an extra £4.7bn for defence in his first budget, after Keir Starmer announced a £298bn defence investment plan (Dip) without having fully identified how it will be funded.
US politics | The US supreme court has upheld the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship, affirming that nearly all people born on US soil are American citizens and rejecting a central pillar of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.
UK news | The European media group Axel Springer has completed its £575m takeover of the Telegraph, ending years of uncertainty over the future ownership of the 171-year-old titles.
US news | Nine matches in the World Cup group stage were played amid potentially dangerous heat and humidity, a Guardian analysis shows.
Clavel was back in Venezuela for her birthday when the earthquake struck. She had not been home for six years. After the capture of Maduro in January, she wanted to return and visit her parents. Last Wednesday, her family gathered together under the impression that they were going to celebrate her cousin’s graduation. In fact, Clavel was there to surprise them all. She was hiding before the party when the shaking began.
“We really thought the building would collapse,” she said, describing how her family huddled together. “At school, they teach you to be under a door and other stronger parts of the house, so we were under an arch in the kitchen. The shaking went on for so long, maybe two minutes. We all thought we were going to die.” Mercifully, all came out unscathed.
During last Wednesday’s 7.2 and 7.5 earthquakes, thousands of scenes of desperation played out along Venezuela’s Caribbean coast. Many were not as lucky as Clavel’s family. Entire apartment blocks collapsed in several towns and cities with people inside. The shaking started so quickly that many had almost no time to escape. La Guaira, a rundown port city near Venezuela’s main international airport, was devastated by the natural disaster. Fissures have opened up on roads. Homes have been destroyed.
Official statistics belie the true scale of the disaster, says Clavel. Mortuaries are overwhelmed, with a steady flow of bodies turning up in the back of cars, pickup trucks and motorcycles. The UN is trying to source 10,000 body bags to help the country deal with the disaster. Civil society groups in Venezuela have banded together to create websites to help people to find missing family members.
“It is very important not to trust the official statistics, especially in Venezuela.” says Clavel. “Over the past 10 to 15 years, opacity has been the rule in this country. In the civil society databases, family members have reported more than 40,000 people missing so far.”
The aftermath of the earthquake has highlighted some of the absurdities of Venezuela’s current regime. Heavily armed military police patrolled the worst-hit areas in the days following the natural disaster, their faces covered with balaclavas. Under Maduro, these same police forces would kidnap opponents to the regime, the same forces that forced Clavel to flee to Miami.
That means Venezuelans are suspicious of their presence. In videos on social media, people question why they have come with guns – why are they not focused on the search for survivors, says Clavel.
“The military police have been very successful at repressing people fighting for democracy or their human rights, we have not seen the same effort trying to save people under the rubble,” says Clavel. “When I was visiting the most affected areas on Saturday, people were walking along the streets with photos saying ‘this is my grandmother, this is my dog’. The police were just there with their faces covered. They have guns but the government does not have equipment to respond to this kind of emergency. No power tools or drones for the search. People feel abandoned.”
Since the earthquake, there has been a major international effort to get search teams on the ground. From Argentina to the UK, specialists have been sent to the site of the disaster to help locate and recover victims with sound detectors, dogs and thermal imaging equipment. But many Venezuelans have resorted to picking through the rubble themselves.
The US has pledged more than $300m in funding to Venezuela after the natural disaster in the form of water, sanitation, food and medical care. Until recently the sight of US military on the ground was unthinkable, but US marines are working to repair the port in La Guaira, at the epicentre of the quake, to aid the delivery of supplies by sea.
Venezuela’s acting president Delcy Rodríguez, put in power with the blessing of the Trump administration, has sought to hold up messages of hope on social media by sharing videos of survivors being saved. Clavel says that observing the US and Venezuela working together on responding to this incident has been surreal – but it is obvious tensions remain.
Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela’s feared security chief, who has a $25m bounty on his head from the US government, was filmed berating US rescue teams as they tried to search for bodies – prompting fury online and calls from US politicians to arrest him. But that behaviour isn’t mirrored by most Venezuelans, who are simply grateful for the help, even if they wish there was a greater push to replace the current regime with one that would allow the construction of a more resilient country.
