The earth shook in Venezuela, twice. He did it with such force that he fractured every last splinter of a State already in ruins. Dismayed by the total absence of authorities, abandoned in their desperation, citizens took to the streets to rescue their loved ones. Without civil protection brigades, without firefighters and without machinery, using only his hands until they were raw. During the first 48 hours they searched for their living and their dead blindly. Now that the fourth day arrives, the tragedy prevails in all its magnitude.
An earthquake is a natural event. But what happens before and after is political. If hospitals collapse, if there are no rescue units, if firefighters are not enough, if infrastructure collapses due to lack of maintenance and hospitals have been looted, the earthquake ends up revealing a previous political history: the total abandonment of the common project. During the years of Nicolás Maduro’s government, more prisons proliferated than outpatient clinics, many more torture centers than proper hospitals. And if we add to that the previous stage of Hugo Chávez, 27 previous years are completed in which the nation never stopped trembling.
Before the buildings, the institutions collapsed in Venezuela. Because there are things for which the regime is responsible: for the destruction of the health system; of corruption; censorship and blocking of media and social networks; of isolation (in 2024 Venezuela broke diplomatic relations with Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Panama, Dominican Republic, Uruguay) and a diaspora of eight million citizens who left a territory impoverished in its most basic economic indicators and devastated in terms of civil liberties.
In just fifteen years, Venezuela has experienced one of the greatest processes of material, moral and political impoverishment. The response capacity of the Venezuelan State to a catastrophe is as poor as its democratic spirit and its respect for human rights. A power that persecutes those who dissent, that tortures, kidnaps, steals and represses does not understand any life as valuable. And this time he has proven it again.
Whoever assumes and designs the nation as a prison, as a place of punishment and surveillance, hardly understands the obligation to assist and help. That the citizen has excess courage and that Venezuelan society is stronger than the times in which they have lived does not minimize an incontestable truth: the illegitimate and authoritarian Government that Delcy Rodríguez maintains after handing over Maduro to the United States is nothing more than an empty box, an immense coffin. The regime is now trying to control aid to a society hit, first by its rulers and now by nature.
*This article was originally published in The National.
