The earthquakes in Venezuela—which left over 4,500 dead, 16,740 injured, and perhaps more than 50,000 missing—could not have come at a worse time.

[Originally published on Marxist.com]

Life was already a living hell for the workers devastated by years of economic catastrophe stemming from US sanctions and the defeat of the Bolivarian Revolution. Now, thousands face a nightmare as they stumble through streets of rubble, the stench of corpses filling the air in the summer heat.

Earthquakes demonstrate preexisting weaknesses and contradictions. Infrastructure which seemed solid disappears in minutes. But none of this was unforeseen. Venezuela is a seismically active zone. 80% of the population of the country lives above the boundary between the Caribbean and South American tectonic plates.

The 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude quakes felt on June 24 are the strongest and most devastating since the 1900 San Narciso quake, though major ones have also hit in 1997, 1967, and even during the 1812 revolutionary war of independence.

Virtually none of the infrastructure in Venezuela is built to withstand seismic waves. Multi-story buildings pancaked, killing entire families in seconds. The worst of the destruction was localized in the eastern neighborhoods of Caracas and above all in La Guaira and Catia La Mar, with lesser damage in neighboring states. Physical damage is estimated to cost nearly $7 billion, with 6.8 million people directly affected.

The working class immediately began to self-organize a response, the main goal being the rescue of thousands trapped under the rubble. Volunteers set up aid stations, received wounded, handed out food and water, and distributed clothing and lodging to the homeless.

Unfortunately, the first few days of the rescue attempt were chaotic and disorganized due to a lack of centralized leadership. Volunteers clogged roads with vehicles, trucks, and motorcycles, creating a bottleneck in the road connecting the capital and La Guaira state where much of the destruction was concentrated.

Rescue aid has also poured in from all over the world. While this aid was welcome, the main shortage in the first days consisted of a lack of rescuers and heavy equipment. This proved deadly as the first 48 hours after an earthquake are the most vital for rescuing those alive and under rubble. Nonetheless, rescuers continued to save people days after the earthquake. This included a two-year-old found alive after being trapped for nearly a week.

Despite these horrific scenes, and the willingness of Venezuelan people to selflessly launch a rescue attempt, the death grip of US imperialism refuses to loosen. Instead, Marco Rubio and his lackeys are using the chaos to tighten the noose.

American vultures circle the dead

Devastating US sanctions—which started under the Obama administration—were ramped up in July 2017 with the aim of destroying the Venezuelan economy. This means anyone who does business with Venezuela cannot do business with the US. And since the US dominates international finance and commerce, this is a blockade in all but name.

This will have a massive impact on the long-term rebuilding of the country, as it blocks the import of heavy machinery, building materials, and telecommunications equipment, but it’s also having an immediate impact on rescue and recovery efforts.

Foreign NGOs have faced an administrative nightmare paying local emergency staff and moving medical and rescue personnel into and around the country.

US sanctions have for years blocked life-saving medication and equipment from reaching Venezuela. Millions of lives have been threatened and even lost, because of a lack of access to treatment for dialysis, cancer, hypertension, diabetes, and organ transplants. The state couldn’t even purchase insulin because US financial institutions would not process payments. This was before the catastrophe of June 24.

“We couldn’t even fully meet the medical needs of our regular patients, and now we are facing this earthquake,” said Huniades Urbina, former president of Venezuela’s National Academy of Medicine. “We have over 16,000 injured people distributed across different hospitals, all of which has pushed the medical system far beyond its limits. Therefore, we are asking the United States to consider completely lifting sanctions so that more medical supplies can enter Venezuela, whether through donations or direct purchases,” he added.

Eugenio Cova, head of the trauma unit at Caracas’ Hospital del Oeste, said he doesn’t even have the screws and plates necessary to repair crushed limbs. They’ve had to operate in makeshift ORs, because the earthquakes have destroyed entire wings of the hospital.

The US has given temporary exemptions for earthquake relief, but this is too little too late. International medical supply chains are not a tap you can turn on and off.

And while the US holds responsibility for the lion’s share of the destruction of the economy, the PSUV bureaucracy has shown its utter incompetence at mobilizing the resources they do have. Instead of using, fostering, and directing the creativity of the working class, they’ve imposed, ordered, and mismanaged efforts. Soldiers and police are often seen standing around while everyday citizens dig in the ground with their bare hands and borrowed shovels, using garbage bags to transport bodies.

In some instances, people gathering donations for survivors were forced to stop by police, as the state wanted to have a monopoly on delivering aid.

It’s easy for western media to blame the failure of “socialism.” If anything, Venezuela shows the dangers of a revolution which was never completed, never abolished capitalism, and allowed the oligarchy to remain in firm control of key economic levers. As the unfinished revolution stagnated, the wealth of the country was never used to its full potential to modernize infrastructure and train the population to respond to natural disasters.

This is also rich in hypocrisy. Criminal negligence and fumbled rescue operations have been a part of every natural disaster in the United States: Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy, and even the COVID-19 pandemic, where hundreds of thousands died preventable deaths.

Still, Venezuela was woefully unprepared. A lack of updated infrastructure, drills, education, and national rescue plans has led to utter devastation. Earthquakes are something which take years to prepare for, both in infrastructure and in rescue tactics. Technicians need to be trained, plans need to be drawn up, building regulations need to be legislated and enforced. None of this happened.

In short, the earthquake exposed vulnerabilities which had been building for years, and Venezuela’s status as a colony of the United States is not helping.

The U.S. tightens its grip

The United States is not wasting this opportunity to increase its control and presence. Marco Rubio was de facto Viceroy of Venezuela before the quakes, as detailed in a recent New York Times exposé.

Rubio now “effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources and its government,” using the proceeds to fill bank accounts in the US treasury. Any semblance of sovereignty is gone:

The US Treasury receives the revenue from most of Venezuela’s exports, then disburses it to Venezuela through the country’s banking system, a relationship akin to parents handing out allowances to children. Mr. Rubio and his team set the conditions on what that money can be spent on, and by whom.

This level of national humiliation is hard to fathom. Delcy Rodríguez even sends some of her social media posts to Marco Rubio for vetting! This is direct colonial domination on a scale not seen in decades. Yet amidst all the death and ruin, John Barrett, US chargé d’affaires in Caracas, has assured that the earthquakes “did not impact the country’s oil and gas sector,” so the syphoning of funds continues unabated.

The Rodríguez government has even invited the genocidal IDF into the country with open arms, even though Chávez called them terrorists and assassins and severed ties in 2009. This has caused a scandal within the government’s own base of support.

“The Zionist regime wants to whitewash its record through rescue teams […] after condemning the Palestinian people to rubble,” wrote Hindu Anderi, spokesperson for the Platform of Solidarity with the Palestinian Cause.

“This is neither aid nor cooperation—it is a silent invasion!” said Chavista political organization Coordinadora Simón Bolívar in a statement, adding:

Under the false narrative of humanitarianism, the two greatest enemies of humanity, the US empire and international Zionism, are carrying out a silent invasion against national sovereignty, exploiting the suffering of the people of La Guaira to advance their plans for territorial control and the plundering of the nation’s strategic resources.

It’s a grotesque farce that the US Southern Command—responsible for the invasion of January 3, which bombed Caracas and kidnapped Maduro—operates openly throughout the country today. The USS Billings and USS Fort Lauderdale are docked in Venezuelan ports. The US military is taking over air traffic control and operations at Maiquetia International Airport. Hundreds of uniformed and armed marines walk the streets. The same helicopters which were used for the invasion on January 3, dot the skies of Venezuela today.

One ABC article by correspondent Jorge Benezra is particularly illustrative of this dynamic. Of the US forces on the ground, he says: “They don’t coordinate, they direct. They don’t collaborate, they order.”

Zoila Cárdenas, a member of the Maiquetía community council, watched uniformed soldiers from her crumbling home. “It’s unbelievable. After all those slogans against the gringos, to have to thank them and watch them come and go as if this were their home,” she told Benezra. “We’ve been taken over. The revolution is lost.”

It could be easy to see US soldiers and feel reassured by the presence of “professionals” coming to rescue the country. But US military presence is not a path to rebuilding. They have ulterior motives. And while search and rescue crews have left, the aircraft carriers and marines will not. As Ricardo Sucre Heredia, a political scientist at the Central University of Venezuela and a former military officer puts it, the constitution prohibits foreign military bases, but serious military hardware is establishing itself and legitimizing its presence through “earthquake relief.”

“What once required a coup d’état is now achieved with an earthquake and an airlift,” says Benezra, adding: “Under the irrefutable pretext of saving lives, Washington has achieved what years of sanctions failed to do: establish a robust military presence in the heart of the Venezuelan Caribbean.”

We can rest assured the Americans will not leave Venezuela better off than when they took it. Just ask the people of Puerto Rico what happened after Hurricane Maria killed over 3,000 and destroyed outdated and poorly maintained energy infrastructure. The US would only let them rebuild the grid as it was before. That is, without any upgrades which would make it more resilient. The United States, which controls nearly every aspect of the Venezuelan government, will not be building seismically proofed infrastructure like Tokyo’s.

What path lies ahead?

The New York Times reporter Simon Romero, who was one of the first journalists in Haiti after the 2010 quake, noted stark similarities:

The parallels between the disasters [in Haiti and Venezuela] are also haunting: Pancaked multistory concrete buildings, bodies flooding into overwhelmed morgues, survivors disparaging government responses, and civilians leading desperate rescues of people trapped in the rubble.

This was a defining moment for Haiti, which, dominated by imperialism for decades, is now a failed state where gangs rule and the state is virtually nonexistent.

Elsewhere in Latin America, earthquakes have a long history of exposing bankrupt regimes. The 1972 earthquake in Nicaragua destroyed the capital Managua and killed nearly 10,000 people. Somoza’s dictatorship embezzled relief money while people suffered. This paved the way for the 1979 Sandinista Revolution which overthrew him. The 1985 earthquake in Mexico City killed thousands and shook the Bonapartist PRI government to its core, exposing its weaknesses.

But for now, and the foreseeable future, few are thinking of revolution. They are trying to survive an incredibly tenuous situation.

The US’s military invasion on January 3 has chained the Americans into a long-term project. The ramifications are difficult to predict. What we do know is that the Trump administration’s three-phase plan for Venezuela (recover the economy, stabilize the country, and transition it to US-controlled “democracy”) has just gained an order of magnitude in its complexity.

Lastly, there must be no illusions in what the American’s true intentions are. What the US gives with one hand, it takes with the other. Their $300 million in ‘aid’ is an insult in the face of the $8 billion in oil wealth they’ve seized, and the $226 billion their sanctions have erased from the economy. The United Kingdom even refuses to give back $4.2 billion of Venezuelan gold they’ve stolen—which would by itself cover nearly two-thirds of the rebuilding costs.

The earthquake has reduced entire parts of the country to ruins, but the US is the real murderer. Its sanctions caused an estimated excess 40,000 deaths a year since 2017. Venezuelans have lived through the equivalent of several natural disasters at the hands of the imperialists.

The wealth of the country, which should be going to rebuild infrastructure to a modern standard, is instead filling bank accounts in Washington. This relationship of domination will continue until the Americans are expelled and the economy is expropriated for the benefit of the Venezuelan working class.