Venezuela’s earthquake: Failures of power and leadership
· Citizen
Bad things happen… and some of them are nobody’s fault.
Big earthquakes in Venezuela are about a century apart (1812, 1902, 2026), so you can’t blame the planners and the politicians for not being prepared for this one.
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How high a priority should they have given to an event that will kill a few thousand people once a century in a country of 28 million people?
Besides, the only thing you can do to “prepare” for earthquakes is to reinforce your buildings and infrastructure – and Venezuela couldn’t afford to do that. Half the population lives below the poverty level.
But there’s plenty of blame to share for the regime’s failure to respond quickly and effectively to the aftermath of the twin earthquakes, just one minute apart.
The chief threat in earthquakes is always collapsing buildings and anybody who is still trapped under the wreckage after three days is almost certainly dead.
In Venezuela that is probably several thousand people by now and their bereaved relatives and friends will be keenly aware that in many devastated areas, the state emergency services were conspicuously absent.
Ambulances usually showed up, but there were no army teams with heavy machinery to dig out the trapped survivors.
The regime has shown it is useless. The country’s new US masters have not covered themselves with glory, either.
“It’ll be big, it’ll be fast, and it’ll be effective,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said of the American aid… and Washington committed $150 million (about R2.4 billion) to the task of recovery and rebuilding.
But most of the foreign crews arriving in Caracas were not American.
The US agency for International Development, once the biggest funding agency for humanitarian and development assistance across the world, would have had its workers in Venezuela within hours of the earthquakes, assessing the needs and setting the wheels in motion.
But US President Donald Trump dismantled it a year ago and nothing has taken its place. If Venezuela is now really a US protectorate, as Trump claims, then he is doing a very poor job of protecting it.
The US government may have offered $150 million in aid for Venezuela in this emergency – but it has also sold at least $8 billion of Venezuelan oil since it took control of the country’s oil industry.
The only official statement about where that money ends up is Trump’s claim that it will be “used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States” – but not necessarily in that order.
It is certainly all passing through American hands – first to a bank in Qatar, then to who knows where?
Venezuelans have grown cynical about their own sub-Marxist “Chavista” regime over the years and they have always been sceptical about the intentions of the United States.
But, so far, they have tacitly accepted the weird collaboration between Trump and Acting President Delcy Rodriguez. After all, it could be worse.
For the nationalists, at least there are no American troops on the ground.
For the quarter of the population who still support the regime, whether for ideological or selfish reasons, it is still in charge, even if obliged to respect Trump’s wishes and whims.
And for everybody else, there is peace and the distant hope of a return to the country’s former democracy and prosperity.
This is a forced and unhappy alliance between two hostile organisations, neither of which cares about the welfare of ordinary Venezuelans, and each has shown that it cannot be trusted to act in their interests.