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.

Rescue teams have freed Hernán Gil alive, a 47-year-old man who had been trapped for almost a week under the rubble of a collapsed building in La Guaira, Venezuela, following the two earthquakes that shook the country last week. More than a hundred operatives participated in an international operation led by Chilean firefighters that lasted nearly 72 hours.

Rescue teams continue to work against the clock in the areas most affected by the double earthquake that shook Venezuela, with the hope of finding survivors becoming increasingly limited. Four days after the tremors, the toll is dramatic: 1,450 dead, 3,150 injured, and thousands missing.

"We have a central and essential objective: to save lives." A few hours after the double earthquake that shook northwestern Venezuela on Wednesday afternoon, Decly Rodríguez addressed the population in a video message surrounded by a dozen senior officials. The interim president tried to make the administration's work visible by showing an image of unity, and asked Venezuelans for the same: "United we will overcome this tragedy." At the most critical moment for Chavismo, practically co-opted by the intervention of the United States, the tragedy has added even more pressure to Delcy Rodríguez's government. But if the executive knows – and can – manage the response well, it can still have a card in its favor in a future negotiation for a political transition in the country.

Venezuela has just suffered two devastating earthquakes that have exposed, if that were even possible, the inability of a bankrupt state to face the harsh reality. The earthquake has stripped bare organizational miseries and exponentially accentuated the torn seams of a country that was not working and that is now literally – physically and psychologically – in pieces.

The scale of the tragedy in Venezuela is worsening by the hour. The images of destruction that captured the attention of the whole world on Thursday have given way this Friday to concern about the rising death toll. The day began with 235 deaths and by the end of the day the toll had risen to over 900. Mid-afternoon another piece of data set off alarm bells: the UN warned that there could be up to 50,000 missing from the double earthquake. Regarding citizens of Spanish nationality, to date, 5 deaths, 106 missing persons have been counted and 14 people have been located buried under the rubble.

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.

This Wednesday two earthquakes of great magnitude have caused chaos in Venezuela and have caused hundreds of injuries and an indeterminate number of deaths: 164 have been confirmed, but this number is expected to increase very considerably, given the proportions of the tragedy. The tremors, of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, have collapsed thousands of buildings in the country, buried people under rubble and caused damage to major infrastructure. Citizens have published videos on social networks showing moments of panic, desperation and terror moments after the catastrophe.

"I was entering the house and I received a notification on my mobile warning of an earthquake. We immediately started to feel the shaking. Glasses began to fall from the cupboards and books from the shelves and we quickly went down to the street. When it seemed to be over, a second tremor shook everything again, even stronger. It was very distressing." This is how the double earthquake that has shaken Venezuela Marisol Tapia, a resident of Caracas. "My building seems undamaged, but the city is full of collapsed buildings," she tells ARA.

Two powerful earthquakes, separated by just 39 seconds, have shaken Venezuela and caused a tragedy of great proportions. The victim toll is still very provisional, with 235 deaths and 4,300 injuries confirmed by the country's government, but it is feared that the figure will increase considerably in the coming hours, as rescue teams can clear the enormous amount of rubble accumulated by the collapse of buildings.

“He didn’t get out today either”, says Eglis Manaure, 50, resignedly, as she climbs the stairs leading to her home in a residential block in Guatire, a town about 50 kilometers from Caracas. She smiles and pretends to be normal, but her eyes betray her: she has a profoundly sad look. "I barely sleep. At one in the morning I'm already awake watching the news to see if they've released him,” she confesses. Her husband, Enrique Parada, was arrested more than six years ago, on April 20, 2020, and since then he has been in a prison more than 450 kilometers away, in the city of Maturín, in northeastern Venezuela. To get there, Eglis takes fourteen hours by bus and can only go every three or four months. She has to choose between paying the cost of the ticket or covering the medicines he needs. Her economy doesn't allow for anything else. The man, 45, has pancreatic cancer.

The surprising indictment of former Spanish President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero for a crime of influence peddling in relation to the rescue of the airline Plus Ultra, at the center of an international money laundering investigation with its hub in Venezuela, has placed the media spotlight on Zapatero's activities in this South American country. However, Venezuela and its relations with its regime have been a recurring source of accusations, controversies, and even judicial proceedings within a highly tense and litigious Spanish politics for over a decade.

In Barcelona it is impossible to find someone who knows anything about Barcelona. The general response is total silence. Only a young man, after thinking a lot, says: "Ah, yes, you have Barça". Possibly, however, the same would happen in the Catalan capital if we asked what people know about Venezuelan Barcelona. Venezuela, in the same way as Catalonia, has a city called Barcelona. It is the capital of the Anzoátegui region, in the northeast of the country, where a good part of the so-called Orinoco Belt is located, which concentrates the largest oil reserves in the world and which is expected to become the center of foreign investments now after the partial lifting of American sanctions. There, for example, the American Chevron operates.

The direct flight connecting Madrid with Caracas was half empty days ago, and it can be said that the majority of those traveling were Venezuelans. It was easy to distinguish them by their peculiar Latin accent and because, upon arriving at Simón Bolívar International Airport, they waited for their turn to go through immigration control with their Venezuelan passports in hand. “Migration,” read a sign at the counter written in four languages: English, Russian, Chinese, and another with Arabic script. In that order. A good metaphor for Venezuela's disparate international allies after the United States "extracted" Nicolás Maduro from the country on January 3rd.This is how Venezuelans refer to the arrest of the former president of Venezuela and his wife, Cilia Flores. That is, as if it were a rotten tooth that had to be pulled, even if it meant disregarding national sovereignty and international law.

It has been more than five months since the US captured Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and the country came under Washington's control, even though Chavistas remain in power.

The Venezuelan Carlos Baute, singer and telenovela actor, stirred up Madrid's Puerta del Sol a week ago. "Out with the monkey!", he shouted, joining the crowd that had gathered to applaud the Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner, María Corina Machado. The words, which referred to the interim president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, caused him more than one headache due to the racism they exuded, for which he, finally, apologized. The methods are new, but the premise is not.

A poorly informed passerby wondered at five in the afternoon if the hundreds of Venezuelans gathered in Madrid's Puerta del Sol were celebrating a football triumph. Seeing children with Venezuela's colors painted on their faces, the sea of flags that flooded the square, and the festive atmosphere that hovered over the event could have suggested it. But no. "It's living what we always wanted there, freedom," summarizes Francisco, who has been living in Madrid for eight years and introduces María Corina Machado as a "bulwark of the fight for freedom." For Clara, who has also been in Spain for eight years, it is "the great hope for achieving a democratic country forever." They are two of the thousands of Venezuelans waiting for the leader of the Venezuelan opposition on the day she has been distinguished by Isabel Díaz Ayuso with the Gold Medal of the Community of Madrid. "She is our future president, the one who has liberated us and the one who has taken away the dictator," thanks Mariel, who left Venezuela 26 years ago and now lives in Seville. "Donald Trump is not the ideal president, but he has given us the encouragement and hope that we can indeed get out of this," acknowledges Frai, who has been living in Valencia for three years.

While Pedro Sánchez received Lula da Silva, president of Brazil, with military honors in Barcelona, at the PP headquarters in Madrid an alternative reception with honors was held for the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. Dozens of popular affiliates, party officials, other anti-Chavista activists, and Alberto Núñez Feijóo himself gathered at the entrance of the headquarters on Génova street to applaud Machado's arrival. The new Nobel Peace laureate, in full European tour, has allowed herself to be courted by the PP – in the afternoon she also has a meeting with the leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal – while turning her back on the Spanish government, with whom she has preferred not to meet.

The Spanish oil company Repsol has signed an agreement with the Ministry of Hydrocarbons of Venezuela and the state-owned company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) that will allow it to resume control of operations and increase oil production in the South American country.

Venezuela has been Telefónica's last stronghold in Latin America since Wednesday. It is the only country where the "telecom" telecom maintains its business after reaching an agreement to divest its subsidiary in Mexico for approximately 389 million euros. Specifically, Telefónica has reached an agreement with the consortium Melisa Acquisition, made up of Oxio and Newfoundland Capital Management, for the sale of its stake in the Mexican subsidiary, as the company has communicated to the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV).