One last phone call and then silence. “There is not much left to say, apart from the feeling of discomfort that many of us feel for having survived…”, with these words a friend from La Guaira had sadly but resolutely concluded after summarizing the situation in dry numbers 16 days after the double earthquake that devastated the eastern coast of the country: 3,691 recovered dead, 16 thousand injured, tens of thousands missing who over time will largely be added to the victims. From the Central University of Venezuela, the open debate on the catastrophe, predictability and scale, however, goes straight into the confused but deep national political crisis, after a quarter of a century of various forms and degrees of Chavista authoritarianism. Natural fatality? Mistaking its difficult and still partial predictability for absolute fatality, we are living in years in which the idea (not at all new, by the way) that it is the whim of events that writes History has taken hold. While at the latest and once again from the School of Sociology of Caracas they reaffirm that “natural disasters” are also and above all “socio-environmental” disasters. That is, in brief but clear terms: wrong material growth choices.
In the specific case, according to specialists who have been investigating the phenomenon that erupted last June 24 for some time, these are urban planning operations carried out based on undeniable social urgencies (the need for public housing) and nonetheless badly interpreted by politics, which did not support them with adequate scientific assessments or – worse – yielded to the pressures of contractors who saw an opportunity to make super-profits. Forgetting the lesson of the fierce deslave de Vargas, where in December 1999 torrential rains caused a gigantic landslide that swept away at least 20,000 people in mud. When certain conditions concur, certain geological formations of our planet tend to undergo similar processes everywhere. For example, the constant vibrations to which coastal soils are exposed due to marine movements reduce their sandy content as well as their consistency and solidity. In a slow but inexorable process, until making the support of the very soils on which structures sink their foundations unreliable.
The (provisional?) government of Delcy Rodriguez, former deputy of Nicolas Maduro, whom Donald Trump replaced with the latter, captured and deported to the United States, does not directly respond to the countless criticisms directed at her by the opposition and even more harshly by those who survived the earthquake saving nothing but their lives. There are many tens of thousands of people deprived of any comfort, entire families with elderly, women, children to whom the little more than 300 million US dollars of aid so far brought by the United States barely ensure momentary survival in the makeshift tent camps that have sprung up around the rubble. Therefore, the impotence of the Venezuelan armed forces, and among these the army in particular, stands out in the most widespread comments. Its image, overlaid a quarter of a century ago by Colonel Hugo Chavez on that of the state, emerges strongly devalued. It confirms the substantial ineffectiveness maintained in the face of the siege and the subsequent raid by the US Delta troops for the seizure of the then still contested president Maduro, their commander-in-chief.
Venezuelans seem resigned to the little international attention aroused by their tragedy. But they are increasingly anxiously witnessing the paralysis of the institution to which the Constitution attributes both the defense of sovereignty and independence, and the protection of the population in case of disasters. A serious problem for everyone, in Caracas and Washington, because the internal order of Venezuela, even post-Maduro, has depended and continues to depend on the authority and operational efficiency of the military bodies and the national army on the front line. General Francis Donovan, with expertise on the Caribbean as head of the US Southern Command, controls with his men Caracas airport, Maiquetia, and the port of La Guaira where the units of the Fourth Fleet are anchored that ensured the first, limited technical and food aid in the hours immediately following the earthquake tragedy. But he certainly could not take charge of an emergency affecting the entire country with over 28 million inhabitants, with partly hidden and in any case uncertain employment, limited press freedom, hundreds of political prisoners and no leader to trust.
