These earthquakes, the deadliest to hit Venezuela in decades, have killed at least 1,700 people, injured thousands more and heaped new devastation onto a country already buckling under a protracted economic and humanitarian crisis. By the end of 2025, the United Nations and independent civil society organizations estimated that more than 7.9 million people faced critical food, water and health care shortages.
Nearly eight million Venezuelans, including doctors, nurses and other essential workers, have fled the country in recent years. The long collapse of public services — sporadic running water, periodic blackouts and dilapidated, poorly supplied hospitals, to name a few — left Venezuelans utterly unprotected when the earthquakes struck. So did years of government attacks on civil society, which demolished the nonprofits and civilian rescue networks that might have aided the response.
My immediate instinct, when the shaking stopped, was to seek information — not a simple thing to do in Venezuela, where the state has long restricted access to various independent Venezuelan and international media outlets. But with the government temporarily granting access to X, Venezuelans have stepped in to document what is happening and share the reality of the crisis from the worst-hit provinces.
What these posts have shown is that in the precious minutes and hours after the quakes, the state has, once again, been absent. Although the Venezuelan government insists it is doing all it can, it has shared little information and deployed the armed forces in a manner that has often been chaotic, insufficient and, in some cases, an obstacle to other relief efforts. Local rights organizations have warned about the risks of human rights abuses should the response be left in the hands of the military. Ordinary citizens and courageous local and foreign journalists are recording volunteers desperately searching for survivors in the rubble, rescue teams working without proper equipment and relatives fighting to save their loved ones with their bare hands.
Washington’s response to the disaster also shows the limits of the Trump administration’s engagement with what the president has suggested could be “America’s 51st state.” This week marks six months since the United States’ capture of Mr. Maduro on Jan. 3 and the subsequent installation of President Delcy Rodríguez. But the Trump administration’s so-called stabilization plan for Venezuela, which charted out the country’s economic and political recovery after years of dictatorship, seemed unlikely to fully materialize even before the earthquakes.
