I count myself among the thousands and thousands of Venezuelans who have seen in the last few hours, videos that circulate on Instagram, X, Facebook and other social networks, in which uniformed officials – police, military – taking advantage of the powers granted to them by their role and their uniform, loot among the rubble. They go to places where there are single-family homes or buildings that have collapsed, to look for money, jewelry, appliances or any valuable asset.
Have the leaders of the drug dictatorship said anything about it? Have the authorities issued any warnings? Have they made any complaint? Nothing. As usual. Not a word.
It is worth asking again if these events are isolated episodes, exceptional cases or if, as occurs with kidnapping and forced disappearance procedures; As with confinement in illegal and secret detention centers, and as with current torture methods, they also respond to a pattern.
We must ask ourselves in the public space, if in the constant looting, the thievery at all hours, the multiple extortion practices, the furtive and unjustified checkpoints, the racketeering at any point in the territory, the robbery of homes during raids and seizures without court orders, we must ask ourselves, I insist and will insist, if all this variety of actions outside the law have something in common, something that can be pointed out as a shared platform.
Impunity is the common platform of the enormous catalog of criminal practices of the Venezuelan police and military. Officials understand that there will be no investigation or punishment for crimes committed against defenseless citizens and families. They only have one limit, one matter in which they cannot make mistakes: stealing from insiders and leaders of the party and government, which could lead to some punishment.
Except for that exception, everything is allowed. And the thing is that, deep down, there lies a kind of belief, a tacit paradigm: that the Venezuelan territory, with its inhabitants and their property, is a private preserve, almost a million square kilometers for the unpunished use and enjoyment of uniformed men, especially if they are fanatics of the regime or if they do some type of activism in its favor.
These are the uniformed bodies – morally undermined, incompetent to pathetic extremes, devoid of professionalism, belonging to institutions impoverished by corruption and looting itself, officials experts in perks and corruption –, the entities powerless to respond to the Venezuelan tragedy unleashed on June 24, after the two earthquakes and the chain of aftershocks that have followed them.
This is the drama that Venezuela, immersed in tragedy, must face: that of a State – institutions, officials, availability of resources –, sunk in misery, in profound stupidity, in exhaustion, in the rot of corruption. I use the word corruption here as a receptacle that collects a culture of abuse, authoritarianism, contempt for citizens, insensitivity to death, a condition where stupidity and prevarication, although this may seem contradictory, do not stop growing.
The State in a situation of rot or semi-rotten is the State that, using the National Assembly for its sinister purposes, intensified the persecution of NGOs and third sector organizations in 2024, neutralizing them, outlawing them and persecuting their leaders, until driving several of them into exile. These structures, many of them highly professional and experienced, will not be able to provide their fundamental capabilities to act in the aftermath of the earthquakes.
As Luis Carlos Díaz recalled this week, they went to the extreme of detaining humanitarian workers from other countries, torturing them and then extorting money from their countries of origin (Colombia, Italy): administrative bodies such as the SENIATto create an administrative and financial fence; and the unusual measure was reached of judicially intervening in the Venezuelan Red Crossto impose authorities tailored to the regime’s taste.
It is the rot I speak of, which keeps the blocking media and social networksat a time when thousands of families demand information, a reliable internet connection, open and fluid communication in the search for their missing relatives, but also because society as a whole needs to know the specificity of what happened, inform itself about the situation, learn about the victims, hear about the dangers that still lie and how to act in emergencies.
Since they feel they are owners and lords of unlimited power over every fact and over every point of the territory, the uniformed men cultivate another specialty: prevent journalists and photojournalists from doing their workas if this could hide the terrible realities of the country, and at this moment, the Dantesque scenes of fallen buildings, of people crying out for help under the twisting rubble, of uniformed men who appear on the scene especially at night, with empty hands, and who search among the remains for what to steal, what else they can steal to fatten their pockets.
Rot is a state that forces the delegation of UN in Venezuela to hire members of the PSUV as officials; or is it the State that lacks a plan to respond to the demands of the families of La Guairawhere life has been reduced to rubble; Or is it the State that, of the five million militiamen it announced a few months ago, does not have even a hundred to help the victims of the seismic horror; or is it the State that, at this time, is making strenuous efforts and preparations to control and loot international aid.
The rotten state of the narco dictatorship is that, right now, I could not answer the most pressing and scandalous of questions: Where is the Bolivarian National Armed Forces? Where, their powerful and vaunted rescue forces? Where are the logistical resources, machinery, tools and supplies to address the suffering of the victims? Is all of this nothing more than an immense farce – another among many – and all their participation at this moment will be reduced to welcoming aid from the United States, El Salvador, Israel, Spain and other countries?
And I close with this: The rotten State of the narco-dictatorship is the one that, at this hour, is preparing to loot the humanitarian aid coming from other countries, from family members and from citizens of the world moved by the continuous and exacerbated suffering of Venezuelans.
*This article was originally published in The Debate.
