Collection drives for food, clothing, medicine, and other essential goods have sprung up across Venezuela. Here, members of Provincial Trujillo Commune organize donations for families displaced by the earthquake. (Gobernación de Trujillo)
There is no such thing as a purely natural disaster, especially in a country under siege. Likewise, the response to any disaster is always mediated by social, political, and even geopolitical factors. Following the devastating 1812 earthquake that occurred during the independence struggle, Simón Bolívar said: “If nature opposes us, we will fight against it and make it obey us.” Today, this remark can sound jarring—like a strange anti-ecological outburst—but what Bolívar meant was that the strategic project of emancipation must remain in the forefront and guide our actions, even when confronting a natural challenge.
This should be kept in mind when we think about the earthquakes that recently struck Venezuela. The natural fact is straightforward: there was a double movement of the earth, first a magnitude 7.2 tremor followed seconds later by another measuring 7.5. In its wake, the destruction followed along natural fault lines, such as the San Sebastián Fault that runs along the La Guaira coast, but it also spread along imperialist-made ones. Foremost among these were the fractures in the country’s infrastructure, emergency rescue capacity, and health system caused by more than a decade of crippling sanctions.
These sanctions, which still number more than 1000, are not merely words and hostile intentions. Mark Weisbrot’s research at CEPR in Washington estimated that they contributed to some 40,000 excess deaths in just one year. For those unacquainted with the international finance system, the impact of a sanctions regime of this kind may be hard to understand. However, the net result is that every international transaction becomes difficult. Ordinary trade and credit lines collapse, while companies, banks and governments avoid transactions, even when they may be technically legal under the sanctions regime, because they lack certainty and fear future reprisals.
The consequences affect every aspect of disaster preparedness and response. In Venezuela, millions of people began to migrate shortly after the Obama Executive Order was published in 2015, including doctors, medics, civil engineers, and other trained professionals. Heavy rescue equipment became harder to repair because spare parts cannot be imported. Hospitals struggled to replace specialized medical equipment. Public utilities postponed maintenance because financing dried up and suppliers fear secondary sanctions. Even when transactions are technically legal, banks and manufacturers frequently overcomply, refusing to participate and leaving institutions to improvise under conditions of permanent scarcity.
A second set of fault lines was opened by the January 3 imperialist attacks on Venezuela, in which democratically-elected President Nicolás Maduro was kidnapped in a military operation that killed more than one hundred people, and left many more injured and traumatized. Although the Bolivarian Revolution succeeded in retaining political power—essential to any revolutionary process—it lost control over Venezuela’s oil sales and was forced to introduce “reforms” to the country’s highly advanced legislation governing its natural resources, especially oil.
All of this means that the earthquake in Venezuela, heartbreaking by every measure, has been made far more lethal—both in its immediate impact and long-term consequences—by factors directly attributable to U.S. imperialism’s ongoing, multi-level assault on the country and its people. Nearly 1500 deaths have now been officially recorded, and that tragic toll will continue to rise in the days ahead. The overall number of casualties will be felt on many levels, and the struggle to mitigate them through an effective, sovereign, and coordinated response is now a battleground, in which the contradiction with U.S. imperialism is at the center.
Radically Different Responses
When the double earthquake struck, it was experienced as an eerie combination of thunderous sound, prolonged and severe movement of the earth, and an oddly colored sky. One observer described it as “wind without wind.” People screamed and dogs went mad with fear. Entire buildings collapsed into rubble, while cracks opened up in the beach where many had gone to spend the national holiday. Days later people remain trapped beneath the debris. The situation is especially grave in the cities and towns that line the La Guaira coast. On social networks, hundreds of photographs and names circulate as families desperately search for missing loved ones.
In such a situation, it is natural to offer aid without first thinking of one’s own interests. This is precisely what people throughout Venezuela and neighboring countries have done. Acting president Delcy Rodríguez’s government has also responded swiftly and forcefully, deploying the means at its disposal in the people-centered manner that has characterized the Bolivarian Revolution over the last three decades. Alongside this official response, there have been massive spontaneous contributions: motorcycles piled high with supplies streamed toward the affected areas, while volunteers joined the huge, state-led rescue effort, and aid teams from Mexico, Cuba, and Brazil arrived quickly with concrete assistance.
If compassion drives the Venezuelan government’s and the Latin American peoples’ response, the same cannot be said of U.S. imperialism, for which concern for humanity has been displaced by the motives of profit, expropriation, and domination, and which has so often sought to turn the misfortune of others to its own advantage. The day following the earthquake, Secretary of State Marco Rubio coolly announced that the Department of War, SOUTHCOM, and the marines would be central to the U.S. “aid” effort.
We have seen this playbook before. Following Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, the barely disguised Trojan horse of U.S. “humanitarian assistance” arrived in the form of an aircraft carrier and some 20,000 troops on the ground. The consequences of that de facto occupation in the Haitian case included an obvious loss of sovereignty, documented cases of sexual assault and exploitation, and the cholera epidemic brought by the occupying forces.
In the face of imperialism’s designs, the voice of the Venezuelan revolutionary people is united around three demands: the U.S. must lift the sanctions completely, unfreeze all Venezuelan assets, and return President Maduro and Cilia Flores to Venezuela. If these steps are not taken, the U.S. presence looks quite a bit like a simple military occupation—an integral part of the recolonizing ambitions expressed by Donald Trump’s MAGA imperialism, with its grotesque revival of the Monroe Doctrine.
In Caracas, while people wait for their homes to be assessed, people are either going to shelters or camping in the streets. Photo: Andrew Drum.
The Battle over the Narrative
The struggle to defend the Venezuelan people, their future, and their projects in an integral manner is also unfolding as a struggle in the media and the social networks. False and malicious claims are circulating alleging that the government is not responding or that it is blocking relief. At the same time, videos from unrelated disasters, including earthquakes in Turkey, have been passed off as footage from Venezuela, alongside a flood of AI slop. Much of this comes from Maria Corina Machado’s disgruntled opposition that feels left out of the post-January 3 deal-making.
What is true is that the large number of well-meaning drivers attempting to reach La Guaira caused the main highway from Caracas to become congested, temporarily preventing heavy machinery and ambulances from arriving. Likewise, so many people, cars, and motorcycles converged around the rescue sites that the voices of those trapped under the rubble were difficult to hear, hampering rescue efforts. National and international rescue teams asked for space to work. The government responded by setting up a coordination center in the sports complex called Poliedro de Caracas, where civilian aid is collected and sent in trucks to where it may be needed. In the center, people who volunteer are evaluated to determine where they can be most useful.
If the COVID pandemic taught us anything it is that only a state-directed response can be effective. Nongovernment operators and individuals are welcome but need to be part of a coordinated effort that only a sovereign state can lead. The most common Big Lie being deployed now by foreign media is essentially the same one which has always been employed against the Bolivarian Revolution: that a level of state authority comparable to—and likely weaker than—that exercised by governments in the Global North is “authoritarian” whenever it is exercised in a Global South country. Meantime, some argue that there is no government response, opening the path for forceful external intervention.
Revolutionary Preparation
The double earthquake hit a country weakened by sanctions but strengthened by the 27-year-old Bolivarian Revolution that has profoundly shaped all aspects of Venezuelan society. If sanctions have systematically weakened Venezuela’s material infrastructure, the Bolivarian Revolution spent more than two decades cultivating a new social metabolism. Though still in formation, it has already become the country’s greatest source of resilience. Communal councils, communes, the civic-military union, and public housing programs all became part of the country’s capacity to respond collectively to the crisis.
The revolution has consistently strengthened the country’s housing stock. Gran Misión Vivienda Venezuela, Hugo Chávez’s housing project initiated in 2011, has produced millions of “dignified homes” all across the country. Most of these buildings, built by a range of Chinese, Brazilian, Belarussian, and Venezuelan firms, have fared well in the earthquake. In the cases where a building was made unliveable—which happened mostly along the coastal fault line—they tended to tilt rather than collapse. Concentrating people in apartment blocks rather than having them dispersed in precarious hillside settlements is also safer, both because of higher construction standards and because it facilitates collective action and the delivery of state assistance.
A second factor is the civilian-military alliance that Chávez promoted. This model, now internalized by the whole population, became the framework for the government’s combined state-and-volunteer response. The civilian-military alliance, which Maduro wisely expanded to include the police, has always been both an institutional arrangement—expressed in the six-million-member militia—and a more widespread political attitude rooted in the class consciousness of civilians and military personnel alike. Its first testing ground was the Vargas tragedy of 1999, precisely where the current hit harder. The civilian-military alliance rose to the occasion then, just as it is doing now.
Finally, it is in the country’s socialist communes that the most far-sighted response is taking shape. Teams from the network called Unión Comunera went to help with rescue efforts in La Guaira. In Caracas’ El Panal Commune, in addition to assessing the condition of the barrio’s buildings, communards set up several collection centers and are creating a shelter for those who have been left houseless by the earthquake.
As in the challenges faced by the food shortages of the mid-2010s, people around the country are turning to communes to collectively solve the medical and existential problems they face and to find a way forward. Given the power of the country’s communal movement and its solid ideological formation, it is possible that the communes could once again become a catalyst for renewed political consciousness. In these difficult times, they may prove decisive in rallying the Venezuelan people around the socialist project, temporarily under the shadow of the January 3 attack.
Years of blockade and imperialist aggression have no doubt left Venezuela materially weaker. Yet the Bolivarian Revolution has produced a new social metabolism that cannot easily be undone: an organized people and a set of institutions capable of responding to crises. If the earthquake has exposed the country’s vulnerabilities, it also revealed where its real strength lies: in the revolutionary people and in deep-rooted social and institutional transformations.
Unión Comunera Brigade in La Guaira. Photo: Brigada Argentina Permanente.
This first appeared in Monthly Review.
