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Four hours after a powerful earthquake destroyed parts of Venezuela’s northern coast and the capital, Caracas, El Salvador’s President Nayib Boucle announced on X that he had offered aid to the Venezuelan government to deal with the aftermath of the tragedy.
Ninety minutes later, Venezuela’s acting president Delcy Rodríguez retweeted a message from the Central American leader, who the regime’s Chavez movement has long considered a political nemesis, not only thanking him for the offer but also directing Venezuela’s foreign ministry to coordinate assistance.
“At times like these, unity among our people is an invaluable force,” wrote Rodríguez, a former vice president of ousted President Nicolás Maduro.
Aside from the sense of solidarity that such tragedies inspire and the political rhetoric that comes with it, Rodriguez has little room to veto governments trying to help with this crisis.
The earthquake exacerbated problems caused by years of economic and political conflict, especially the strained health system. The South American country’s economic situation is in crisis due to poor fiscal management and US economic sanctions against Venezuela’s central bank and state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). Between 2013 and 2021, the country’s economy shrank by three-quarters.
Multiple countries join rescue efforts in Venezuela
A series of rescue operations have been launched in Venezuela following last week’s powerful twin earthquakes. Back-to-back earthquakes of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 hit the South American country, killing at least 1,450 people, according to a leading Venezuelan lawmaker.
Figures from Venezuela’s central bank provide a glimpse of the scale of the task facing Rodriguez. In 1998, the year before President Hugo Chávez took office, the country’s total external debt was US$28.311 billion. Twenty years later, the country had a debt of US$108,369 million last year, when official statistics for the sector were released.
Asdrubal Oliveros, an economist at the Institute of Economic and Social Studies at Andrés Bello Catholic University, currently puts the figure at US$161.3 billion, a much lower estimate than the US$240 billion reported in the Financial Times on the day of the earthquake.
The U.S. Geological Survey’s dire predictions, predicting billions of dollars in losses and thousands of deaths, evoke memories of another tragedy that occurred more than 27 years ago, in December 1999, during the Chavez era.
On December 15 of that year, on the very day that the Chávez movement voted to approve a new constitution, massive landslides occurred in several locations on Venezuela’s central coast, destroying the entire town of Carmen de Uria in La Guaira (then known as Vargas) and killing hundreds of people.
A month later, the Venezuelan government denied the arrival of two humanitarian aid ships sent by the United States at the request of then-defense minister Maj. Gen. Raul Salazar. This was a highly controversial decision, considering the scale of the destruction and the number of people reported missing.
Years later, I interviewed Salazar, then retired from active military service, for the Venezuelan newspaper I worked for, and asked him about the episode. The official said that then-President Chávez refused the aid, seeing it as a violation of his sovereignty, but he also suspected that the refusal was due to the formation of an alliance with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, a partnership that was in its infancy at the time.
Mr. Chavez never spoke publicly about this particular episode. In January 2007, the then-president declared socialism in Venezuela and began to establish himself as an anti-imperialist leader in Latin America, supported not only by his alliance with Castro but also by the support of the governments in power at the time in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, and Bolivia, while using the country’s vast wealth as a geopolitical weapon to advance diplomacy.
“We’re there for our new great friends.”
The very same areas hit by the 1999 landslide were also the hardest hit by last week’s earthquake. President Chávez’s past decisions have resurfaced on social media as an example of what must not be repeated. The situation has changed following the U.S. detention of Mr. Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and the Trump administration’s close relationship with Mr. Rodriguez, which would have been unimaginable last December.
Even before Rodriguez publicly requested assistance after the deadly earthquake, US President Donald Trump himself declared that the US was “ready, willing and able to help,” indicating the White House’s growing influence in the South American country.
“I have directed all agencies of government to be ready to act quickly,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “We’re there for our new great friends.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the United States would immediately send search and rescue teams, medical resources, and humanitarian aid to the South American country. In addition to equipment to assess the damage and locate victims, the U.S. will provide $150 million in aid to Venezuela, the State Department announced. He pledged $100 million to the United Nations Humanitarian Fund for Venezuela and $50 million to aid organizations already working in the country.
Civilian volunteers and rescue teams from around the world have flooded into the country to search the rubble, including teams from the United States and several Latin American countries. Rodriguez said Saturday night that 24 countries were sending aid and more than 2,700 rescue workers were in the country to help with search efforts. Venezuelans have expressed frustration with the government’s slow response and lack of heavy equipment to rescue loved ones.
The heroic work of international and local rescue teams brought moments of hope and relief. A US team rescued the infant from beneath the rubble, the US State Department said. Salvadoran rescue workers successfully rescued a 15-year-old girl and her dog trapped in a collapsed building in the city of Catia la Mar, La Guaira state, and also rescued a woman who had been trapped for 86 hours, President Bukele said.
CNN reports as rescuers listen closely for signs of life at scene in Venezuela
Given the scale of the tragedy and the scale of its external debt, Venezuela needs far more aid than is currently arriving to assist those affected and rebuild its infrastructure.
National Assembly Speaker Jorge Rodriguez, brother of acting President Delcy Rodriguez, said Sunday that the quake had displaced more than 12,000 people and damaged or destroyed 774 buildings, including hospitals. According to the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF, an estimated 680,000 children are in need of humanitarian assistance.
The earthquake’s aftermath has exacerbated an ongoing crisis that has forced millions of Venezuelans to live in a war-like economy for the past decade, even though the country is not in formal armed conflict.
Prospects for improved living conditions appear to be receding, eclipsing the modest progress Rodríguez’s government has boasted in less than six months in office: designing a legal framework more favorable to private investment, slightly increasing the country’s oil production, and lowering inflation to 6.3% in May from 10.6% announced by Venezuela’s central bank in April.
And this time, unlike in the first year of Chávez’s government, when some Venezuelans still saw the new president as a source of hope, neither oil revenues nor total international aid will be enough to alleviate the effects of the most powerful earthquake in a century.
