Venezuela, let's all run there

In an earthquake, poverty kills more than the tremor itself. An earth tremor of the same intensity will kill far fewer people in Japan than in Venezuela. Construction techniques and the preparation of the population and emergency teams in developed countries act as a shield. That we have to spend billions on weapons and not on protecting people from natural disasters (and here I directly include the effects of climate change, which are affecting Europe more intensely every day) is an insult to humanity and its collective intelligence.

But even more obscene is the wave of emotionality that always follows a natural disaster. Countries react with solidarity and hastily send military planes loaded with humanitarian aid (with the donating country's label clearly visible), because now we will not leave our Venezuelan brothers alone in the face of the tragedy that unites us and blah, blah, blah. Until, with each passing day, the news of the earthquake falls lower down the news ticker and nothing more is heard of it.

As the Jesuit Jon Sobrino said after the earthquakes in El Salvador in 2001, the same year as the attack on the Twin Towers in New York: “Governments worldwide have been forced to take a kind of anti-terrorism oath, but an anti-poverty, anti-injustice, and anti-contempt for the poor oath is not seen anywhere near. And the anti-terrorism oath expresses a lot of structural selfishness.”

Now let's all rush to Venezuela, and that's fine. But the solidarity will not last long. It would be much better if we did not turn peoples into hostages of geopolitical strategies so that an earthquake, however intense, would not turn into a massacre.