CARACAS—When U.S. forces seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 3, Washington did not hand power to opposition candidate Edmundo González, the real winner of Venezuela’s fraudulent 2024 election. Instead, U.S. President Donald Trump chose to install Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, as his replacement. White House officials thought she would be a disciplined and technocratic administrator willing to govern under U.S. tutelage and open Venezuela to foreign investors, per New York Times reporting.
Then, at 6:04 p.m. on June 24, the ground in Venezuela moved.
CARACAS—When U.S. forces seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 3, Washington did not hand power to opposition candidate Edmundo González, the real winner of Venezuela’s fraudulent 2024 election. Instead, U.S. President Donald Trump chose to install Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, as his replacement. White House officials thought she would be a disciplined and technocratic administrator willing to govern under U.S. tutelage and open Venezuela to foreign investors, per New York Times reporting.
Then, at 6:04 p.m. on June 24, the ground in Venezuela moved.
Two strike-slip earthquakes—magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5—ruptured 39 seconds apart beneath the state of Yaracuy. It was the most violent seismic event to strike Venezuela since 1900. As of Wednesday, the tremors had killed at least 2,295 people and injured more than 11,267, according to the Venezuelan government. At least 40,000 remain unaccounted for, according to independent open-source platforms. The United Nations has warned that the humanitarian toll is likely to climb. Some buildings in Caracas collapsed, while the nearby coastal city of La Guaira was practically flattened.
A week on, the deeper casualty is the fiction at the center of Washington’s bet on Rodríguez. The earthquake did not just level buildings. It revealed the hollow state she leads.
The Venezuelan state that U.S. officials claim is now run by a competent manager has delivered an earthquake response that International Crisis Group analyst Phil Gunson described as “anything from totally non-existent to at best completely inadequate.”
In La Guaira and across Caracas, Foreign Policy witnessed survivors clawing through concrete with bare hands, with pickaxes and sledgehammers, and conversing with trapped people through rubble while authorities with heavy machinery never arrived. Venezuelan firefighters, residents noted bitterly, had no fuel and no tools. The government posted barely any guidance to inform the population about rescue efforts and opened no official collection centers for donated goods. So the response fell to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), neighborhood associations, churches, schools, universities, and private companies.
The government also outright obstructed some relief efforts. In Mérida state, a mayor from Rodríguez’s party banned civil society groups from opening collection centers. A team of Colombian rescuers was reportedly held for hours at Caracas’s international airport amid bureaucratic and security delays before authorities finally waved them through. When Rodríguez toured the shattered Caracas district of Chacao on Friday, residents met her with boos; in the state of Falcón, desperate locals broke a military cordon with shovels after security forces blocked access to affected areas where residents were searching for survivors.
It took two full days for the government’s only real reflex to surface: It nominally militarized La Guaira and demanded that volunteers from other cities receive safe-conduct passes issued from Caracas in order to enter. Rodríguez announced a troop deployment in La Guaira that people who spoke to Foreign Policy could barely find.
There is no central government registry or coordinating authority for relief efforts, and no functioning state-led missing-persons system. The Pan American Health Organization found that Venezuela’s forensic and morgue services had collapsed and that its casualty tracking was inadequate.
Into that vacuum poured everyone but the state: neighbors and volunteer rescuers, the diaspora, the opposition. From exile, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and opposition leader María Corina Machado coordinated relief through online networks; civil society created various open-source platforms to register missing people and record local needs and infrastructural damage; influencers turned their feeds into real-time information hubs, amplifying calls for help and sharing missing-person reports.
In short: WhatsApp groups and Instagram accounts did the work that Venezuelan government ministries could not. Civil society did not so much complement the state as stand in for it—and that improvised substitution was quickly overwhelmed.
Some private-sector juggernauts had assured Washington that Rodríguez’s government would not buckle in this way. Former Chevron executive Ali Moshiri shaped the CIA’s recommendation that the United States keep Venezuela’s security apparatus in place to guarantee institutional continuity and an uninterrupted flow of oil, rather than gamble on the opposition and risk an Iraq-style unraveling, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The earthquake was the first real stress test of that proposition. It failed.
Aerial view of collapsed buildings following the earthquakes, in Caraballeda, Venezuela.
Aerial view of collapsed buildings following the earthquakes, in Caraballeda, Venezuela, on June 28.Miguel MEDINA / POOL / AFP via Getty Images
The earthquakes were not a purely natural catastrophe; earthquakes are always interactions with the built environment. Millions of Venezuelans live in seismically exposed zones—many of them in informal settlements and Hugo Chávez-era public housing blocks that engineers believe were built with little regard for construction codes, with some units perched on soft sediment. Hundreds of these units were severely damaged or even collapsed. And although the government tightened building regulations after a 1967 earthquake, older buildings may not have been modernized accordingly.
Layered atop that physical vulnerability was a state stripped to the studs following almost three decades of mismanagement and systemic corruption by Rodríguez’s Chavista predecessors. Civil-protection units lack equipment; hospitals have long been drained of medicine and running water; and state institutions are hollowed out of staff, resources, and any semblance of professional management or strategic planning. Around 70 percent of the country’s roughly 28 million people lived in poverty before the first tremor.
Authorities have even rationed information. The country hasn’t conducted an official census in 15 years, making post-disaster accounting difficult. More than 200 websites remained blocked when the quakes hit, and the government only partially restored access to X—an important information channel—after organized civil society and the U.N.’s fact-finding mission in the country demanded that Venezuelans be allowed to communicate.
A state that cannot prepare its citizens for and respond to natural disaster turns a tremor into a massacre. The 1999 Vargas landslide, which buried thousands and tested Chávez during his first year in government, was supposed to have taught Caracas that lesson a generation ago.
Any rebuilding effort will have to contend with Venezuela’s structural failures. The country is currently attempting the largest sovereign debt restructuring in modern history—a process so fraught that it lacks International Monetary Fund (IMF) participation. The country has some $240 billion in liabilities; its annual GDP has shrunk from $370 billion in 2012 to roughly $111 billion in 2026, the biggest economic contraction during peacetime in modern history.
That makes emergency borrowing difficult. Caracas reengaged the fund in April and is so far tapping a thin slice of its IMF reserve assets for reconstruction, both because those reserves are limited and because exhausting them would further strain an already fragile economy. A rapid satellite assessment of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) estimated direct physical damage of the earthquakes in Venezuela at $6.7 billion, within a range of $4.7 billion to $8.7 billion. But that figure captures only housing and economic assets; it excludes infrastructure, broader economic disruption, and the long arc of reconstruction.
Total impact in disasters of this kind, UNDP cautioned, typically runs 1.5 to 3 times the direct-damage estimate—which pushes Venezuela’s plausible bill toward $20 billion. That’s a number on par with postwar reconstruction. The U.S. Geological Survey modeled economic losses above $10 billion. Reinsurance analysts at Aon offered the grimmest footnote of all: Insured losses will be a fraction of the total bill, assuming Venezuela carries any earthquake coverage at all.
Against these figures, the relief on offer reads like peanuts. Washington committed $150 million to Venezuela, routed through faith-based groups and U.N. agencies, with a larger nine-figure package promised. The Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean pledged $300,000 in humanitarian aid and seeded a reconstruction fund with an initial $1 million. UNICEF says it needs $52 million to respond to the earthquakes but has only been able to raise $3.5 million so far.
These costs are hitting an economy already in shambles. Venezuela entered this disaster with depleted fiscal buffers, massive debt, broken institutions with no democratic legitimacy, chronic inflation, and almost no ability to mobilize large-scale reconstruction efforts on its own.
Residents of a damaged building following the earthquakes sit at a makeshift shelter at Caraballeda Golf & Yacht Club, in Caraballeda.
Residents of a damaged building following the earthquakes sit at a makeshift shelter at Caraballeda Golf & Yacht Club, in Caraballeda on June 29. Jesus Vargas/Getty Images
All the while, Caracas is filling with tents as thousands of displaced people from dozens of structurally compromised or destroyed buildings both in the city and from La Guaira move into public parks and squares. This is just the beginning of a broader crisis: The country has no credit, negligible insurance, and a population far too poor to self-finance its recovery. A state in that condition does not rebuild quickly; it accumulates ruins, misery, and lawlessness.
The frustration in the streets has already curdled into something political. Incidents of looting swept the city of Catia La Mar in La Guaira; there were multiple reports that police and soldiers joined in on the theft, especially for valuables from damaged homes and ruins. (Looting is rare in disaster scenarios and normally a sign of previous social collapse.) Survivors have threatened to block roads to force authorities to provide more robust relief.
Locals have stopped or pushed aside government officials who have shown up at ruins only to take official photos, and citizens have repeatedly berated, confronted, and even beaten security forces that allegedly tried to steal relief and money found in the ruins. Rodríguez has been widely criticized for inviting rescue workers to a televised ceremony rather than allowing them to continue working in La Guaira and meeting with disaster victims while wearing a Moncler jacket worth more than $1,000.
This natural disaster might soon create a political crisis, especially as a defiant Machado signals that she may soon return to the country. Even before the tremors, Rodríguez’s government was already extremely unpopular. According to April polls conducted by AtlasIntel for Bloomberg, just 31 percent of Venezuelans approved of her management. And a few weeks before the earthquakes, local pollster Delphos found 87 percent of Venezuelans believe political change is very necessary.
Just months ago, U.S. officials thought that Rodríguez could guarantee stability and recovery in Venezuela. The earthquakes proved them wrong. Without genuine democratization and a real technification of Venezuelan institutions—the boring, unglamorous machinery of a state that actually functions—there will be no reconstructed Venezuela. There will only be a more broken one: more tents, more rubble, and more reason for the rage already gathering in its streets.
