Marian Da Silva Parra is a human rights lawyer and a postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute.
Two earthquakes struck the north-central coast of Venezuela seconds apart on Wednesday. At magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, they were among the strongest the country has felt in more than a century. As of Friday morning, the government acknowledged there were at least 589 deaths, with hundreds more missing or trapped under rubble. The United States Geological Survey warned the death toll could climb past 10,000. Between those two numbers lies the nature of the current government: what it is willing to admit and what it has spent 27 years hiding.
The Chavista revolution started when Hugo Chávez assumed power in February 1999, promising a reborn republic. In December that year, the Vargas floods and landslides revealed the gap between the government’s revolutionary ambition and a failure to protect the country’s people. As torrential rains on Dec. 14 lashed the coastline, which was significantly impacted by Wednesday’s earthquakes, a reporter asked the president whether the constitutional referendum scheduled for the next day should be postponed. Chávez, never a man to let weather interrupt destiny, answered with a quote most often attributed to Simón Bolívar: “If nature opposes us, we will fight against it and make it obey us.”
Bolívar’s original line was apparently said in 1812, standing in the ruins of yet another Caracas earthquake, which royalist priests called divine punishment for the independence struggle against the Spanish empire. In 1999, nature did not obey. Within hours, the mountains of Vargas state gave way. Mud and water rushed toward the sea. The estimated death toll ranged from 5,000 to 50,000. The most widely accepted tally is 30,000 — a devastating measure of the disaster and the government’s failure to account for its dead. Even as the bodies were still being pulled from the mud, the constitution passed Dec. 15 with 71 percent of the vote and more than 50 percent of abstention. Venezuelans have called it, ever since, the day nature did not obey.
Venezuela sits on the seam where the Caribbean and South American plates grind past each other. The Boconó fault was there long before the Chavista revolution. However, the cruelty is everything the government built — and failed to build — on top of the fault.
Consider what 27 years of this regime did to basic infrastructure, health care and emergency response services. The economy contracted by roughly three-quarters between 2014 and 2021. Oil production cratered, aided by firing engineers and replacing them with workers whose only credential was loyalty to the government. The bolívar lost all of its value, and nearly 8 million Venezuelans left.
The state’s much-celebrated Great Housing Mission claims to have built more than 5 million homes. However, it’s impossible to say how many were actually built. One independent estimate from 2024 put the number at 134,771, with many of them cracking and leaking without proper urban planning, and some erected on unsafe geological faults. Billions of dollars passed through that program. The question of where the money went answers itself if you have lived in the country. Instead of modern homes, Venezuela is filled with apartment blocks built in the 1960s, which engineers have warned cannot survive the shaking the city should expect.
The United Nations estimates roughly 5 million Venezuelans experience hunger. Hospitals are operating at 50 percent capacity. The country spends a fraction of what the World Health Organization recommends on health, and it has struggled to build hospitals.
Where did the capacity to respond go? Some of it was stolen. Corruption by the state oil company is estimated to have drained around $21 billion into private accounts. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s national debt is $240 billion.
The people huddling in their destroyed apartments are wondering: Debt for what? Not for safe housing or infrastructure capable of protecting people when disaster comes, nor for hospitals and schools that work or water systems and electricity that function.
President Nicolás Maduro is gone, after U.S. forces seized him in a January raid. The man who inherited Chávez’s promise to fight nature and make it obey now sits in a New York jail. But the system did not fall with him. Delcy Rodríguez, a Chavista to the core, runs the country now. In the earthquakes’ aftermath, her government’s response has been predictably insufficient. In some areas, residents say help was slow to arrive, volunteers dug through wreckage by hand, and people had to bring food and medicine to the disaster sites themselves.
The United States has spent the months after removing Maduro not dismantling the system he built but doing business with it. It lifted sanctions on the government in April. Chevron signed a deal at the presidential palace, raising its stake in a Venezuelan oil venture to 49 percent. And roughly 100 million barrels of Venezuelan oil have already been processed under the U.S. government’s watch with minimal oversight. That is the government Washington has chosen as its new and great friend, its partner in barrels and bonds. The same government that emptied hospitals and stole oil profits that should have retrofitted old buildings.
I hope that this collapse might force the regime and the foreign powers lining up to do business with it finally to assume what they have spent a generation rejecting: responsibility for basic human rights and dignity they were supposed to protect, but buried instead.
Nature opposed Venezuelans on Wednesday, as it has before. But it was never nature they needed to fight.
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