How to rebuild Venezuela in the face of horror

Metaphors abound to describe what the twin earthquakes that struck Venezuela’s coastal north mean, both materially and symbolically. Two weeks on, official figures report thousands of deaths. But stories from the ground reveal a grief layered on top of another grief: the Venezuelan state’s failure in La Guaira, two governments and a single massive disaster. Faced with the horror, an unavoidable question arises: how to rebuild the country?

As days pass, new layers of the tragedy have emerged. One is inequality. Although no social class was shielded from the disaster, differences between those with resources and those without became apparent from the very first hours. In the zero zone of the central coastline, heartbreaking scenes sit side by side: private cranes and backhoes working in front of collapsed residential buildings while, just yards away, other families keep digging through rubble with sledgehammers to find their loved ones.

However, the gap does not seem to respond solely to economic status. In Caracas, a wealthy municipality run by opposition official Gustavo Duque responded differently. There, emergency protocols, evacuations and early care were activated.

The first 48 hours exposed the paralysis of Venezuela’s Chavista state. While bodies lay on sidewalks, desperate calls to rescue survivors flooded social networks and the airwaves of independent media.

Then came a second wave of appeals. With wounds still fresh, many residents began pleading for excavators to remove tons of concrete and steel “without charging me a fortune” — at least $500 a day — so they could recover the bodies decomposing beneath the rubble while family members watched helplessly. In temperatures exceeding 86°F (30°C), the smell of death hangs over a landscape that will need far more than rebuilt infrastructure. It will require a public policy of mourning, comfort and recovery.

The two earthquakes also exposed more clearly the complex web of real power in Venezuela. This is where the drama of the de facto protectorate that the country has become since January 3 comes into focus.

International delegations arriving to assist with emergency operations were reportedly given a warning: two governments are operating in Venezuela — the one formally headed by Delcy Rodríguez and the one exercising effective oversight from the United States.

U.S. officials, including chargé d’affaires John Barrett and General Francis Donovan, head of U.S. Southern Command, have publicly provided updates on international aid efforts. Nearly 2,000 U.S. troops remain in Venezuelan territory and have also assumed responsibility for air-traffic control operations at Maiquetía, the country’s main airport, which was disabled by the earthquakes.

Various photographs have shown Barrett and U.S. military officers interacting cordially with Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, the most prominent face of Venezuela’s repressive apparatus and a man for whose arrest the United States has long offered a $25 million reward. Until recently, the two sides appeared irreconcilable enemies.

The earthquakes once again confirmed the deeply pragmatic nature of Venezuelan authoritarianism. Just as it adapted to international sanctions, it now appears capable of adapting to a condition of external tutelage. While Delcy Rodríguez continues to insist she holds authority, her brother Jorge has come to oversee much of the visible apparatus of government. The ruling troika — Cabello being the third pillar — is internally recalibrating.

By contrast, María Corina Machado — the political leader behind the opposition’s victory on July 28, 2024 — remains stranded in Panama after a failed attempt to travel to Venezuela. She told journalist César Batiz on July 7 that the conditions for her safe return to the country are still being developed.

In moments like this, political action is often viewed with distrust. Yet perhaps it has never been more necessary: to denounce negligence, protect human rights, monitor the use of public resources, give structure to citizen protest and defend a republic facing one of its most vulnerable moments.

The technical scale of the disaster is also immense. The United Nations Development Programme preliminarily estimated direct physical damages at $6.7 billion, equivalent to 6% of gross domestic product. Engineer José María De Viana blames the massive collapse of buildings on the combination of the seismic fault and decades of development on sedimentary soils without adequate controls. Anthropologist Rogelio Altez points to another structural factor: the sustained loss of the state’s technical and scientific capacity.

The tragedy is also taking a political toll. An Atlas Intel poll shows a sustained rise in disapproval of Delcy Rodríguez’s administration, from 44% in January to 63.3% in June. At the same time, U.S. President Donald Trump said he sees no conditions for holding elections in Venezuela. As Venezuelans might put it: things were already bad, and then they got worse.

In this context, how can a political transition be organized amid the rubble?

Faced with institutional collapse, historian Margarita López Maya and political scientist Magdalena López have proposed creating an Emergency Governing Board. Their proposal rests on a logical diagnosis: if the problem is the absence of a functioning state, the solution can hardly be to wait for those responsible for that void to fix it on their own.

The proposal envisions forming a collegiate body of Venezuelan society professionals — engineers, seismologists, doctors, risk managers, economists and social scientists — with the technical capacity, public legitimacy and sufficient autonomy to coordinate the reconstruction effort. In addition, “this board would have a dual simultaneous task: attend to the immediate emergency (rubble removal, victim identification, housing, among others) and, at the same time, work together with Delcy Rodríguez’s government and representatives of the country’s majority democratic opposition to lay the political and institutional foundations for a democratic transition that can no longer be postponed.”

A similar technical proposal comes from Kenneth Ramirez, president of the Venezuelan Council on International Relations. He proposes forming a government that includes credible figures both inside and outside of Venezuela. He argues that, since the current government lacks legitimacy and capacity, this team could manage the reconstruction effort, seek fresh funding and restore Venezuela’s place in the inter-American system.

Much of Venezuelan territory sits atop seismic fault lines. Despite that reality, the country never developed a consistent disaster-prevention policy. The same could be said of its institutions. Venezuela has spent years perched atop a vast political and institutional fault line. If the accumulated energy of discontent continues without a democratic outlet, further upheavals seem inevitable.

Although civic solidarity has been admirable, it is far from becoming a system capable of sustaining devastated communities for months or years. The wave of solidarity is likely to fade with time, leaving exposed once again what millions of Venezuelans have been saying for years: the country needs profound change, both in leadership and in its governing model. Those who dismantled it must leave.

Since 2022, the social base supporting the governing movement has begun to fracture. That rupture became visible during the opposition primaries of 2023 and reached its clearest expression on July 28, 2024, when millions of Venezuelans voted for Edmundo González Urrutia. Even now, amid grief and destruction, the dominant feeling remains the same: abandonment in the face of a government that appears willing to appropriate even hope itself.

Reconstruction will require labor, machinery, scientific expertise and financial resources. But it will also require a new political architecture. An Emergency Board alone will not solve all of Venezuela’s problems. It could, however, provide the minimum framework on which to begin building a possible future.

It will not be enough to clear the rubble. Venezuela must also repair its institutional fabric and address the pain of a society that has been asked for far too long to remain resilient when, in reality, it has been on the verge of breaking for years.

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