Good discoverers of garlic soup, our Mr. Esteve's Trumpists point out very excitedly that the tremendous inoperability shown by Venezuelan public services in facing the tragedy of the double earthquake is a direct consequence of the corruption of the Chavista regime. That Chavismo was, and is, corrupt to the bone is an unquestionable truth; we thank them for their clarity. It is a pity that the sharp analysts of the wretched right-wing forget that Venezuela has been a kind of protectorate of the USA and the Trump administration for half a year, which they usually find so admirable. The incursion of American troops and special forces on January 3 in Caracas was a real coup d'état and a wild and blatant violation of international law, in line with the role of global sheriff that Trump likes to play so much.In these six months, it's not that the Yankee government has done anything to free Venezuelans from the Chavista dictatorship: it's that it has maintained it just as it was, with the only difference being that we have heard nothing more about Nicolás Maduro (he is locked up, awaiting trial, at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, or so they say) and that in his place is now his former vice president, Delcy Rodríguez. She and the rest of Chavismo remain intact in power, only in the role of US puppets, which Delcy Rodríguez and her colleagues do not care about at all because they completely disregard what dignity might be. The other big difference —the only fundamental difference— is that now Venezuela's oil is in the hands of the US: Venezuela has ceded up to about 50 million barrels of crude oil that Washington directly markets, with profits of about 2.8 billion dollars. (Trump must be credited with a funny moment, when he let María Corina Machado, idol of the Spanish and Catalan right, know that he did not count on her as president of the new/old government, a snub to which she responded by offering to share the Nobel Peace Prize, as if it were a hamburger with double bacon.)After being impetuously freed from the dictatorship, the Venezuelan citizenry continues to be as screwed, mocked, and helpless as ever. And when tragedy struck in the form of an earthquake, the US government's aid was crumbs (at least Venezuelans can be grateful they weren't sent J.D. Vance to make things even worse). We have learned —you can read it in this newspaper— that Trump has increased his personal fortune by 1.4 billion dollars during the first year of his return to the presidency, thanks to the cryptocurrency business. His emulator Milei also encouraged Argentinians to invest in a cryptocurrency, and it was a fraud. Since they imitate the MAGA movement down to the pattern on the curtains, it's only a matter of time before some of the brains in Spanish politics, after some economics master's degree, tries a crypto-scam from within the institutions. How bad is Chavismo.

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.

The earthquake catastrophe in Venezuela has turned the news into a loop of very distressing epic rescue operations. Also of scenes of heartbreaking pain from people who know they will not find their relatives alive or who have found them too late. How many rescues are considered necessary to show in a single newscast for the viewer to understand the dimension of the tragedy? One of the differentiating factors between private and public channels is the ability to broaden the perspective. In a context of chaos, ordering information and offering a narrative that portrays reality with the complexity it deserves is what the newscasts of TV3 and TVE are doing, where correspondents and special envoys specify locations and show circumstances tangential to the disaster: the situation in hospitals, the functioning of emergency services, the saturation of cemeteries or neighborhood initiatives to offer solutions in the face of a lack of food or communication systems. Private channels, on the other hand, emphasize the most emotional aspects, especially related to the suffering associated with the countdown to find survivors under the rubble. It is symptomatic how these images are offered to the audience: always with the ambient sound of the scene, with many shouts, noise of machines and sirens in the background. These are videos recorded in a context of great tension and anguish, and therefore, they have a morbid component due to the alarm they arouse.

I am writing this article when the real magnitude of the two Venezuelan earthquakes is still unknown. For now, the number of fatalities does not align at all with that of the missing persons, which foreshadows a terrible outcome. Each generation usually experiences, near or far, some natural catastrophe that invites reflection, but those that mark us the most are perhaps those contemplated through the eyes of a child. Mine —I was born in 1964— witnessed on the ashen TV of late Francoism the Managua earthquake of 1972. I was eight years old and I remember harrowing images, because at that time there was little concern for hurting or not hurting the sensibilities of the public during children's hours. Somoza's ultra-corrupt dictatorship had built entire neighborhoods with precarious materials, and an earthquake of significant, but not extreme, magnitude —6.2 on the Richter scale— killed between 15,000 and 20,000 people (the real figure was never disclosed) and left about 300,000 homeless. Anastasio Somoza then became a living metaphor for the greed that leads to disaster. A parallel generational evocation related to that country: shortly after, the Nicaraguan singer Carlos Mejía Godoy triumphed in these parts ("Son tus perjúmenes, mujer...").Many generations before mine, in the year 1755, another earthquake, in this case of apocalyptic dimensions, devastated the city of Lisbon. Between 30,000 and 50,000 people lost their lives there. Here the metaphors went beyond the literary description of a tragic event. In the midst of the Age of Enlightenment, this had a great impact on the main European intellectuals, who opened important debates. The catastrophe became an intellectual earthquake as profound as the geological one. The destruction of the city and the death of so many people shook — and this is no sinister play on words — the enlightened confidence in the rational order of the world. In Candide, Voltaire reacted with unprecedented virulence, mocking Leibniz through the character of Pangloss. The catastrophe forced a rethinking of the relationship between God, nature, and history: is evil an accident, a test, or perhaps the realization that the world does not correspond to any moral purpose? The discussion was projected into literature, theology, and politics, anticipating the turn towards an increasingly skeptical sensibility. The Enlightenment ceased to be optimistic and even confident; Voltaire formulated it cruelly: in the face of evil, one should not seek metaphysical consolation, but human responsibility. The old metaphors about progress and the lights of reason underwent notable changes. In general, they darkened.

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.