The level of U.S. involvement in Venezuela since American forces captured its former president this year is remarkable. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has become a “de facto viceroy,” my colleagues report in a revealing story published this weekend. Through a steady stream of WhatsApp messages with its new president, Rubio controls Venezuela’s export revenues and decides how that money should be spent, who should be allowed to do business in the country and who should hold important offices.
That kind of authority over a foreign government is, let’s say, unusual. But it also comes with big risks for the United States — risks that have only grown after a pair of devastating earthquakes last month. That’s because the U.S. is entangling itself with a deeply unloved, unelected government that is rapidly losing its already limited credibility over a disaster response widely criticized as incompetent. Today I write about the explosive post-quake politics in Venezuela.
Rage vs. repression
When the earthquakes came, much of the social housing project known as OPPE 26 — a densely populated set of concrete high-rises in the Venezuelan state of La Guaira — collapsed completely.
Drone videos reveal the scale of the destruction. The piles of dust and rubble the quakes left behind no longer resemble buildings at all.
The towers of OPPE 26 are far from the only buildings to have collapsed during Venezuela’s massive back-to-back earthquakes last month. But their utter destruction has taken on an outsize symbolic value.
These concrete blocks, home to thousands of people, were part of a showcase project of the Hugo Chávez government, built under a state program called Gran Misión Vivienda. They were a promise, as my colleague Julie Turkewitz writes, “to house the poor in dignity” as well as, in chavismo-speak, to “break the capitalist logic that commodified the home.” One Misión Vivienda project in La Guaira was named after the former president himself; the town homes in the Hugo Chávez complex “crumbled like toy houses,” Julie writes, amid questions about the quality of their construction.
The collapse of this state-built housing has fueled the post-earthquake rage at a repressive government that forfeited much of its legitimacy, even among many Chávez supporters, long ago. Now people are openly and forcefully voicing their anger at the government for the first time in years. Will anything change as a result?
‘Pockets of death’
Buildings like OPPE 26 weren’t just social housing. They were, as my colleague Anatoly Kurmanaev puts is, “the apex of a sprawling patronage system that helped keep the Socialist Party of Venezuela in power for nearly three decades.”
Plans for the buildings began in 2011, just ahead of an election, at a time when the Venezuelan state still had oil money to spend. Construction proceeded hastily; design details and information about soil tests were largely withheld from the public. Many were built by foreign companies with opaque contracts.
When they were completed, the government gave these apartments away and did not charge rent, Anatoly writes. In return, recipients were expected to attend government rallies, vote for its candidates and pressure their neighbors into doing the same. Those who supported the opposition risked losing their benefits, including the apartments.
It was a deeply transactional system; it also built a community.
But residents, seismologists and watchdog groups had long warned about the conditions in the OPPE complexes, including cracks in the walls and gas safety issues. (Complexes OPPE 25, OPPE 27 and OPPE 33 were also badly damaged.) In 2017, the president of the Venezuela College of Engineers called the questionable structural integrity of the units “a state secret.”
On June 24, the buildings became, as Julie memorably put it, some of Venezuela’s “densest pockets of death.”
“These people weren’t killed by the disaster,” said one man, who was searching for his son’s wife and their two children among the rubble. “They were killed by the government because they built these buildings like garbage.”
The return of repression?
His comment reflects something Julie noticed in her reporting on the earthquakes’ aftermath. People are suddenly talking to her in ways “that would have been unthinkable just a year ago,” she writes.
They’re angry that civilians are doing the vast amount of the rescue and recovery work, without training or equipment. They’re furious that Venezuela’s leader, Delcy Rodríguez, wore a luxury Italian ski jacket while visiting quake victims. And they’re openly saying so, in a state that still retains its vast repressive apparatus.
Many are also angry at their new American overlords who, after seizing President Nicolás Maduro and promising a phased transition to democracy, have nothing to show for it.
What happens next? In the months before the earthquake, Venezuela showed signs of tentatively creeping toward more political openness: Some political prisoners were released, and small protests were tolerated. But in the aftermath of a disaster that has killed 3,500 (a number that is still likely to rise) and has left thousands more homeless, openness might be harder to sustain.
The response might be a return to repression.
One test will come on July 28 — the second anniversary of the last presidential elections, which independent analysts say the opposition decisively won, only to have it stolen by Maduro. Labor unions and others are calling for countrywide protests.
The last time major social unrest broke out, after that election, Venezuelan officials responded by sending the military into the streets, killing protesters and locking people up. If something similar were to happen now, what would the U.S. do?
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