Venezuela: it is worse than it seems

For two years I dreamed of the day I would return to Maiquetía, home to Venezuela's main international airport. I spent those years practically in exile. Like many other Venezuelans living abroad, I stopped visiting my country when President Nicolás Maduro intensified his repression against critics and human rights defenders, like myself, after he fraudulently came to the presidency in the 2024 elections.

Recently, several human rights defenders were released, so I felt I could risk returning home to see my family. I was expecting a quiet visit.

The two earthquakes were recorded just a few days after my arrival. I held my mother's hand for what felt like an eternity as the ground shook violently beneath our feet. When we went outside, we found a transformed world, with collapsed buildings, cut telephone lines, and missing loved ones. It is difficult to assimilate the magnitude of the tragedy we are experiencing.

But in the days since, one thing has become clear: the earthquakes have revealed the price paid for years of corruption, institutional dismantling, and the state's abandonment of Venezuelan citizens. This crisis is both the tragedy of an authoritarian regime and a tragedy of nature. Venezuela's natural disaster was inevitable, but the devastation it has left in its wake was not.

These earthquakes, the deadliest to hit Venezuela in decades, have killed at least 3,500 people, left thousands injured, and added a new wave of devastation to a country already reeling from a prolonged economic and humanitarian crisis. By the end of 2025, the United Nations and independent civil society organizations estimated that more than 7.9 million people were facing critical shortages of food, water, and healthcare.

Nearly eight million Venezuelans, including doctors, nurses, and other essential workers, have left the country in recent years. The prolonged collapse of public services – sporadic running water, periodic blackouts, and dilapidated, ill-equipped hospitals, to name a few – left Venezuelans completely unprotected when the earthquakes struck. The same can be said for years of government attacks against civil society, which dismantled the nonprofit organizations and civilian rescue networks that could have aided in the response.

My first instinct, when the tremors stopped, was to seek information, which is not at all easy in Venezuela, where the state has long restricted access to various independent media outlets, both Venezuelan and international. But now that the government has temporarily allowed access to X, Venezuelans have mobilized to document what is happening and share the reality of the crisis from the most affected states.

What these publications have revealed is that, in the crucial minutes and hours after the earthquakes, the state has once again been absent. Although the Venezuelan government insists it is doing everything possible, it has shared very little information and deployed the armed forces in a way that has often proven chaotic, insufficient, and in some cases, an obstacle to other aid efforts. Local human rights organizations have warned of the risk of abuses if the response is left in the hands of the military. Ordinary citizens and brave local and foreign journalists are documenting volunteers desperately searching for survivors in the rubble, rescue teams working without adequate equipment, and families trying to save their loved ones with their own hands.

Washington's response to the catastrophe also highlights the limits of the Donald Trump administration's commitment to what the president has suggested could be "the 51st state of the United States." Last week marked six months since Maduro's capture by the United States on January 3 and the subsequent inauguration of President Delcy Rodríguez. But the Trump administration's so-called "stabilization plan" for Venezuela, which outlined the country's economic and political recovery after years of dictatorship, already seemed unlikely to be fully realized even before the earthquakes.

Although Venezuela's oil production has increased since Maduro's ouster, the Trump administration has created a highly unusual escrow account to control revenues, which first passed through an account in Qatar and now through the U.S. Treasury. Venezuela exported nearly 100 million barrels of oil, valued at an estimated $8 billion, in the first four months of the year, but it is unclear how much of that money has reached the Venezuelan people.

Following the earthquakes, the U.S. government has pledged approximately $300 million for relief efforts and sent an emergency team and two search and rescue teams. This falls far short of the $632.2 million that the United Nations estimated Venezuela would need in humanitarian aid by 2026, even before the disaster, of which $470 million remains unmet. The country's needs will now be much greater.

Faced with all these shortcomings and dysfunctions, the people of Venezuela have shown enormous solidarity and resilience.

But the mutual support of Venezuelans – however impressive – is not enough to rebuild the country.

Venezuela now needs to resupply medical and emergency rescue teams, obtain more machinery to clear rubble, find food and shelter for tens of thousands of people who may have lost their homes or been displaced, create protection systems for unaccompanied children who have survived the earthquakes, and develop a plan.

This crisis has highlighted a little more the fragility of the country's neglected infrastructure. How can Venezuela chart a path to recovery when people's trust in the government is so low? How can Venezuelans feel protected by a United States government that doesn't answer questions about where the money has gone? How can Venezuelans expect help from a regime that has repressed and abandoned them? These questions demand answers, and Venezuelans deserve them now, not tomorrow.