On June 24 two powerful earthquakes rocked Venezuela within seconds of each other. While approximately 120 people died in the capital, Caracas, the worst damage occurred just north. In the state of La Guaira, along a strip of popular Caribbean beaches, one apartment tower after another collapsed. Thousands of people died.

I’ve made the thirty-minute drive from Caracas to La Guaira many times with friends for trips to the beach. But what I saw when I got there eight days after the earthquakes recalled photos of bombed-out cities. Whole stretches of buildings—both luxury condominiums and government-built apartment blocks—had been flattened, reduced to shards.

Here a building fell into a tangle of twisted steel and buckled concrete, the thick floor slabs smashed tightly together. Nearby another one remained precariously standing, but with an outer wall stripped away, exposing a closet of clothes still on their hangers, a children’s bunk bed, a family room painted orange, with the English word HOME stenciled on the wall, the “O” in the shape of a house. I walked up a hill of ruins and emerged, to my surprise, at the edge of an empty swimming pool, an unblinking blue eye staring at the sky. Exhausted rescue workers lounged beside it in pool chairs. Atop another pile of debris, I realized that I was standing on what had been the roof of a tall building, although I was only fifteen feet above the ground. All the while the Caribbean lay before us, with its shades of blue, whitecaps scudding, forlorn beach umbrellas flapping in the breeze.

In the first days after the disaster, Venezuelan social media was full of videos of desperate La Guaira residents begging for help. Many of them pleaded that they were on their own, without aid from their government, digging through the wreckage by hand in search of survivors. In some areas firefighters or civil defense workers provided assistance, but often with no apparent coordination, or even equipment. (One Caracas cop told me that members of his unit rushed to La Guaira, but only to search for their colleagues’ relatives and then return home.) Thousands of ordinary citizens from Caracas and other parts of the country came to fill the vacuum, bringing food, water, and medical supplies, and joining the hunt for the missing.

By the time I arrived, on July 2, international aid groups such as World Central Kitchen and the Red Cross were serving hot meals or operating field hospitals. Search and rescue teams from more than two dozen countries zipped around in pickup trucks—although it turned out that a man who was rescued that morning would be the last to emerge alive. Amid the horrifying destruction, the most visible sign of the Venezuelan government were the hundreds of soldiers posted on the roads, charged with keeping order. People bitterly criticized and even cursed them: they had been sent to La Guaira with assault rifles instead of shovels.

“This is totally abandoned by the government!” a man named Rogelio Dávila exclaimed when I approached him on a mountain of rubble that had once been part of a complex of thirteen-story apartment towers known as OPPPE 26 and 27. The complex, in an area called Caraballeda, was built during a massive housing construction drive in the final reelection campaign of Hugo Chávez, the left-wing populist who was Venezuela’s president from 1999 until his death in 2013 (the year the complex was completed). The name OPPPE refers to the Presidential Office of Plans and Special Projects, created by Chávez to exert control over certain development programs. Ten of the complex’s sixteen towers had fallen, forming a stomach-churning moonscape of contorted metal and concrete. The destroyed towers contained more than 850 apartments, making this perhaps the most densely populated spot in the disaster zone. It is likely that more people died here than anywhere else in La Guaira.

Dávila had come from his home south of Caracas to help search for his aunt, Inés María Zurita. He and Zurita’s husband, Alejandro Salcedo, had spent the last few days tunneling through the rubble by hand. When the quake hit, Salcedo, who works for a local bus company, was outside the building. He watched it fall, knowing his wife was trapped inside. As I spoke with the two men, I could see dozens of people just like them, swarming over the mounds of the ruined buildings in a frantic race to find lost relatives. I’d talked to others who insisted that their loved ones might still be found alive. But Salcedo and Dávila were less sanguine. “The important thing is to find her, in whatever condition,” Salcedo said.

They had established a small camp on the ruins. Under a gray tarp and a blue Barbie beach towel rigged up on broomsticks and pieces of rebar, they had stashed a mattress, a large bottle of water, and tools, including a shovel, a pry bar, a sledgehammer, and white plastic buckets. Dávila slept on the mattress at night to guard their possessions, while Salcedo stayed at a school that had been converted into a shelter. Through a combination of luck and persistence, they had tunneled down to what was left of apartment No. 1005, which Salcedo and his wife had shared for thirteen years. They found the family cat, still alive. Salcedo recovered a photo of his mother and a Venezuelan flag that had belonged to his wife. The men affixed the flag to a pole among the debris. It hung limp, under ashen clouds. They had located the kitchen and the living room, but no sign of Zurita, and were now attempting to burrow through to the bedroom.

I asked Salcedo, who is seventy-two, how old his wife was, and he told me she was sixty-seven. But Dávila insisted she was only sixty-three. They argued comically, absurdly—“I always kidded her, ‘Auntie, you’re ten years older than me!’” “But you’re not even fifty yet!” “I’m fifty-three!”—a shred of normal family banter amid the horror. The argument tapered off and Dávila put on leather gloves, preparing to carry his tools up the slope and resume digging. “It’s been eight days now and we haven’t even seen any army work crews,” he said. “There are so many soldiers in Venezuela. They should be out here helping us clear rubble, helping people like us.”

Salcedo said that heavy machinery was needed to lift the thick floor slabs and make a careful search possible. I had seen a few backhoes and cranes around La Guaira, but there were none at OPPPE 27. “Most of the people here are the residents, people that lived here or had families here,” Salcedo said. “We’re the ones that you see here, giving it our all.”

Before the earthquakes struck, Venezuelans were struggling to understand their country’s new semicolonial relationship with the Trump administration. On January 3 the US attacked Venezuela, abducting the country’s de facto president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, and bringing them to New York to stand trial on drug trafficking charges. Maduro, who took over after Chávez’s death, was widely hated. His policies wrecked the economy, he tossed politicians and ordinary people who dared to criticize him into prisons where torture and other abuses were common, and in 2024 he stole the presidential election, hiding the true vote count and declaring himself the winner.¹

Many people hoped that Maduro’s departure would point the country back toward democracy. Many also expected that it would clear the way for María Corina Machado, the popular opposition politician who earned a Nobel Peace Prize for spearheading the 2024 election campaign against Maduro, to return from exile and lead Venezuela. But instead Trump announced that the US would “run” the country and take control of its petroleum reserves, which are the largest in the world. And he left Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, in charge as his proxy.²

Rodríguez, a fifty-seven-year-old lawyer educated in Paris and London, is the daughter of a leftist organizer who was tortured and murdered by the Venezuelan government fifty years ago. She was close to Maduro but has no political base of her own. Since his ouster she has pliantly carried out Trump’s wishes, rewriting laws governing oil and mining to suit foreign corporations, lowering their taxes, and removing many restrictions on their activities. She has also welcomed military cooperation with the US, as demonstrated in a June air strike that is said to have killed Héctor “Niño” Guerrero, a leader of the Tren de Aragua gang.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has spoken vaguely of an eventual democratic transition. But Trump’s priority is pumping oil and making “a lot of money.” Trump repeatedly praises Rodríguez, who returns the favor. On July 24, a month after the earthquakes, he said that Rodríguez was “doing a fantastic job” and added that Venezuela was “not ready” for elections. An oil sector expert with contacts in the Trump administration told me that officials in the Energy and State Departments had advocated postponing elections for at least a couple years, arguing that companies might otherwise delay the investments that Trump desires out of concern that the rules might change again under an elected government.

Despite this, many Venezuelans continue to see Trump as their savior. “Now that the Americans are here, we want them to stay for good,” another man digging for lost relatives at OPPPE 27 told me. The man, who asked me not to use his name because he was an army deserter, was thrilled to learn that US marines had arrived with earthquake relief. “The American soldiers who came, we want them to take over everything,” he said.

Not all Venezuelans share this opinion. I met Yoxana Medina in Caracas’s Southern Cemetery, where she had gone to bury her brother, Yorman Medina. When the earthquakes hit, Yorman, who was fifty, rushed out of his shop in the Caracas neighborhood of 23 de Enero and was struck by a piece of falling masonry. He died about a week later. Medina angrily dismissed Trump’s remark that Venezuelans were happy and dancing in the streets after his January intervention. “I think that for him it was all just a cover to take our riches,” she said, sheltering from the tropical sun under a small umbrella. Medina lives in a Caracas neighborhood near the military base where Maduro was captured, and the battle must have sounded terrifyingly close. At least seventy-nine soldiers and four civilians died in the US raid. “Innocent people were killed,” she said. “You can’t be happy when people are dying.”

A cemetery worker in a red T-shirt with a Chavista insignia used a trowel to smooth the soil of Yorman’s grave. Dozens of people milled about, some attending one funeral, some another. The graves were crowded together, cement tombs rising a couple of inches above ground level. Small groups stood or sat atop the graves. A vendor walked among them, hawking ice pops: “Chupi chupi! Chupi chupi!”

After Maduro became president, Venezuela lost 75 percent of its economic output. Eight million people fled the country—over a quarter of the population. Most went to Colombia and other South American countries, although hundreds of thousands reached the US. For most of Maduro’s time in office, Venezuela had the world’s highest inflation rate; prices this year are projected to rise nearly 400 percent. The surge of hope following Maduro’s capture dissipated as the rest of his government stayed in place and the cost of food and other necessities climbed ever higher. Under US tutelage, oil production has increased, but ordinary people continue to struggle. The US, according to Trump, has commandeered at least $13 billion in oil revenue. It’s unclear how much has been transferred to the Venezuelan government.

“We’re worse off now than when we were worse off before,” Medina told me. “When Maduro was here things were bad. But after they took him away it seems to me that things are worse than ever.” And then the earthquakes hit. Medina has two children, and I asked her what sort of future she envisions for them. “Unfortunately,” she said, “I think that for the young people today, there is no future.”

At a news conference on July 2, Rodríguez defended her response to the earthquakes, saying that she acted quickly to dispatch the armed forces and civil defense units and to request international assistance from the US, the United Nations, and even El Salvador and Israel—countries led by right-wing leaders with whom Venezuela had an antagonistic relationship before the US takeover. “We did everything that was within our ability and we will continue to do everything that is within our ability and more,” she said. Venezuelans, she insisted, were grateful for all she had done.

To deflect blame, she conjured a shadowy enemy: “media laboratories” that she said had used social media to bait people into rushing to La Guaira, ostensibly to help but really to increase traffic and prevent first responders from getting through. It was impossible not to hear in her accusation an echo of the stolen 2024 election, when Maduro’s government blamed unnamed hackers in North Macedonia for an alleged cyberattack that supposedly disrupted vote counting. As vice-president, Rodríguez had applauded Maduro’s bogus victory and went on television to promote the cyberattack fiction.

In propping up Rodríguez, Trump has made life increasingly difficult for Machado, the preeminent opposition leader. When Machado announced her intention to return to Venezuela after the earthquakes, a State Department official dismissed the plan as a “political stunt.” The White House prevented her from flying from Virginia to Curaçao as a first step to returning home, forcing the plane she was on to turn back.

Instead the administration has supported a more moderate opposition leader, a former legislator named Dinorah Figuera, who has lived in exile in Spain since 2018. The State Department has endorsed talks between Figuera and Rodríguez’s government that would establish basic conditions for future elections. This may be another attempt to sideline Machado, while providing some legitimacy to Rodríguez as she seeks to attract foreign investment and renegotiate the national debt, reported to be as high as $240 billion—a number that would make a potential restructuring one of the largest in history.

I met Marcos Linares, a parish priest, at his church in the Caracas neighborhood of Montalbán. The church, Nuestra Señora de la Paz, operates a soup kitchen and a medical clinic. When Linares drove to La Guaira three days after the earthquakes, one of the things he noticed was the contrast between the well-equipped international rescue teams and their Venezuelan counterparts. Several Venezuelan rescue workers begged him for help obtaining equipment like helmets, boots, and ordinary tools, Linares told me. “They didn’t even have a bathroom to meet their basic needs, and they didn’t have good flashlights.” As we spoke we were interrupted by volunteers who wanted to discuss the church’s work distributing food to earthquake victims—one hundred meals to be sent to one location, three hundred to another. I asked what his reaction was when he saw La Guaira leveled. “I said to myself, my God, we’ve got to ask God’s forgiveness,” he recalled,

because we’ve had the best resources, the biggest resources, and I would even be so bold to say that this is the richest country in the world. There’s got to be a reason why certain other countries have their eye on us…. But the first thing that came to my mind was to say, here we have a sin of omission. We haven’t thought big enough, we haven’t thought about the future.

Linares said that after the earthquakes two engineers in his parish told him in confession that they had worked, years earlier, on construction projects in La Guaira—one of them on a government project and the other for a private developer. They had each quit when they realized that the work wasn’t complying with building codes, but walked away without sounding the alarm.

Long before the earthquakes, La Guaira was the site of another tragedy that left a lasting mark on the country. In December 1999 torrential rains caused landslides that swept away entire communities. The death toll was never established, but as many as 30,000 are estimated to have perished. Chávez was sworn in as president earlier that year, and the landslides occurred on the day of a national referendum on a new constitution, which was a centerpiece of his political project. The disaster in La Guaira (then known as Vargas state) turned into an early test for him. Help arrived from numerous countries, including the US, although Chávez rebuffed a proposal from the US military to land on the Venezuelan coast and clear a crucial highway blocked by the landslides. I learned while reporting my 2022 book on Venezuela³ that Fidel Castro had persuaded Chávez to reject the offer, telling him that once US troops were on Venezuelan soil they would never leave.

Much was made of the contrast between Chávez’s famous rejection and Rodríguez’s effusive thanks to Trump for US assistance. But what choice did she have? She inherited from Maduro a nation hollowed out by corruption and economic devastation. Public services were slashed. Hospitals barely function. Blackouts are common. And now the country has been reduced to a ward of the Trump White House.

The tail of the 1999 tragedy was long. Rebuilding plans were only partly fulfilled. Thousands of people spent years in shelters waiting to be relocated to new housing. The government created a system of concrete channels to divert runoff and prevent future landslides, but they were not maintained; as I drove through the earthquake zone I looked up at the mountain to see the now useless channels overgrown with brush.

“We work with a hindsight methodology, not a preventive one,” Linares said, lamenting that Venezuela hadn’t learned from the 1999 disaster. “We don’t realize that today we have enough and tomorrow we will be in need.”

The two tragedies in La Guaira form painful bookends to twenty-seven years of Chavista government. The new constitution approved by voters in the 1999 referendum increased presidential power, which Chávez exploited to undermine checks and balances and set the country on the path toward Maduro’s authoritarianism. The landslides also marked an early escalation of Chávez’s anti-imperialist rhetoric, which used Washington as a foil to energize his base and raise his profile as a global leftist leader. Today, with Rodríguez as its custodian, Chavismo is a burlesque of itself. Those who shouted the loudest against gringo imperialism now raise their voices to praise their masters in Washington.

I returned to the shattered OPPPE buildings about a week after my first visit. Dávila was sitting in the same spot where I’d last seen him, under the tarp and the Barbie towel. He told me that they’d finally found his aunt’s body, and he described in detail what happens to a corpse after so many days in the tropical heat. But he continued sleeping there to safeguard the tools. He said he was staying to help others still looking for their relatives.

“We learned a lot here,” Dávila said, staring past me. “We learned to dig in the rubble. We learned how to carry out a body in an advanced state of decomposition.” He seemed numbed by the accumulation of death, powerless to break away and return to normal life.

Venezuela has been stuck for years, unable to emerge from the wreckage left by Chavismo. It is too early to know whether the earthquakes will shake it free. So far, the anger on the debris piles of La Guaira has not led to antigovernment demonstrations. Rodríguez has made common cause with Trump against her strongest rival, Machado, and Trump’s primary concern is to keep the oil flowing. The all-important armed forces have stayed loyal to Rodríguez. Having failed in its basic function of caring for its own people, Rodríguez’s government has tried to control the narrative with numbers. It refused to estimate how many people were missing, which was likely to be an inconveniently large number. But it did state that 6,462 people were rescued—a squishy statistic, since most rescues occurred in the chaotic first days, when no one was counting. The government also insisted for weeks that only 856 buildings were damaged nationwide, of which 190 collapsed. But a NASA analysis of satellite images estimated that 69,431 buildings “were likely damaged or destroyed.”

The figure that everyone cared about most was the number of people who died, and that number crept up daily. Then, without explanation, after a month, the government stopped publishing data, only to resume again ten days later with a weekly update. On August 24 the count stood at 6,509. The interruption and the lack of transparency could only feed skepticism, a reminder that Rodríguez has a credibility problem she cannot escape: if you can’t be trusted to count votes, then you can’t be trusted to count bodies. As the focus shifted to removing rubble, relatives stood vigil beside ruined buildings out of fear that the government wouldn’t take the necessary care to extract the bodies trapped inside.

I met Michael Penfold, a political scientist, on the terrace of a Caracas café. While he has been critical of successive Chavista governments, Penfold agreed to serve on a committee created by Rodríguez after January 3 to promote “peace and democratic coexistence.” He was then denounced by opposition hardliners for the sin of being willing to talk to those with whom he had political differences.

Penfold is keenly aware of the challenges ahead in both rebuilding the country and recovering its democracy. “The reality is that you cannot do this without the US, but the US cannot do this without Chavismo and the armed forces,” he said, referring to the Rodríguez government and its still powerful military component. “And the armed forces and Chavismo by themselves can’t do this without some kind of legitimacy coming from the democratic opposition in Venezuela,” he said. “It’s a really tough political puzzle.”

“It’s going to take time,” he added. “It’s going to take some craft and leadership.” I asked whether the earthquakes made change more or less likely. “I think the earthquake has left the country realizing that there’s no step backwards,” he said. “But there’s no clear step forward either.”