Venezuela Earthquakes Expose Crumbling Foundations of Chavismo Amidst Government Response Crisis

Before two powerful earthquakes reduced the OPPE 25 government housing project to rubble, the foundations of Hugo Chávez’s populist “Bolivarian” revolution were already destabilized in this former stronghold of support.

Gabriel González recalls his joy in 2013 upon receiving keys to his newly completed apartment in one of the 12-story towers that Chávez had ordered constructed in an upscale area of the resort town of Caraballeda.

The 45-year-old construction worker lost his previous home during mudslides and spent two years in emergency shelter before receiving his beachside housing. “It was wonderful,” recalled González, a longtime supporter of Chávez’s socialist party, PSUV. “The Chávez government helped the poor so much … Back then, everyone was on Chávez’s side.”

However, shortly after moving into OPPE 25, Chávez died, and in subsequent years, González and many neighbors grew disillusioned. Years of poverty, mass migration, hyperinflation, and authoritarian rule under Nicolás Maduro fueled widespread discontent. “Everyone around here said the Bolivarian revolution … was no more – that it was no longer the same,” said González, whose siblings fled to the US and Brazil. “Unfortunately, what happened is that it became a dictatorship.”

Last month’s twin earthquakes devastated Venezuela’s north coast, revealing a revolution in ruins as Chávez’s successors struggled to respond to a catastrophe for which they appeared unprepared.

“We don’t have a government,” González complained recently as he stood by his donated tent at a golf course near his destroyed home. Two weeks after the disaster, his 22-year-old son, Daniel, and mother-in-law, Esmeralda, remain missing while his family squats amid the wreckage awaiting news.

Like many residents of La Guaira, the hardest-hit northern state, González criticized the sluggish response of Venezuela’s acting leader, Delcy Rodríguez, the former vice-president installed in January after Maduro’s abduction by Donald Trump.

“Unfortunately, I haven’t seen anyone here. I haven’t seen a governor. I haven’t seen a mayor,” said González, who spent 24 hours buried under OPPE 25 rubble with his wife, Rosa, before miraculous rescue. The couple now depends on humanitarian aid and church members bringing food and prayers.

Experts agree few nations could have been fully prepared for the extraordinary ferocity of the 24 June disaster – 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude quakes less than a minute apart that toppled large, densely populated buildings like OPPE 25 within seconds.

“It was a truly extraordinary event,” said Carlos Genatios, a structural engineer and disaster planning specialist who served as science and technology minister after Chávez took power in 1999.

Genatios noted the earthquakes released energy equivalent to 240 Hiroshima atomic bombs. “It was much worse than the [7.0] earthquake in Haiti, which is considered the 21st century’s greatest catastrophe,” he added.

Even so, Genatios, who went into exile after criticizing Maduro’s regime, believes the government has questions to answer about a calamity that killed at least 4,118 people and injured nearly 17,000.

In a known seismic zone, why were such large buildings constructed on soft soils that shook like jelly during the earthquakes? Were social housing projects like OPPE 25 – along with nearby luxury properties that also collapsed – properly built with adequate materials and following strict building codes? Had Venezuela’s Chavista rulers sufficiently prepared seismology, health, and emergency services for natural disasters? Or were they distracted by their obsession with retaining power?

Genatios argues that once the dust settles, a thorough investigation is needed to determine where blame lies. However, the former minister is convinced lives could have been saved had successive governments better planned for such disasters. “It would have been impossible to have zero losses,” Genatios argued. “But the losses could have been far fewer.”

Loss permeated the streets around OPPE 25 as distraught, sleep-deprived families clawed and tunneled through an apocalyptic landscape of crumpled tower blocks searching for loved ones. Occasionally, they paused from excavations to watch corpse collectors in yellow helmets and blue scrubs haul disfigured bodies from the debris.

Relatives of those trapped beneath collapsed buildings painted pleas on their walls. “Precident Deisy Rodrigues [sic] – please help. My son is in here,” read one message on a block of flats near OPPE 25.

Many survivors reported that crucial hours and days after the tragedy brought no help. Alongside mourning, profound anger emerged over the lethargic, bungled response from Rodríguez’s officials and troops, with civilians taking the lead in rescue efforts while security forces stood idle with weapons.

“There are more rifles here than pickaxes and shovels – and what we need is pickaxes and shovels,” complained Milagri Rodríguez Guanire, one of nearly 8 million Venezuelans who migrated in recent years, who flew from Chile to search for her mother in OPPE 25’s wreckage.

Fury over the government’s response amplified longstanding grievances building for years in working-class areas that were traditional regime strongholds.

The estate walls display propaganda celebrating “the eternal giant” Hugo Chávez and his heir Maduro, depicted in one mural as an “iron-fisted” superhero named Super Mustache.

However, many expressed sadness and indignation at how, after Chávez’s oil boom years, Venezuela plunged into one of modern history’s worst economic crises under Maduro due to plunging crude prices, inept governance, corruption, and crippling US sanctions.

“[It’s] a pile of shit … we need to get rid of these rats,” fumed Roberto Dupuy, a 65-year-old cook, whose daughter was lost when two of OPPE 25’s seven towers collapsed. The remaining five buildings were so severely damaged they seemed close to collapse.

Other residents of Chávez-era estates along Caraballeda’s Caribbean coast angrily described suspected badly constructed buildings where ceilings leaked, elevators didn’t work, and powdery cement walls raised questions about structural integrity. “They were poor-quality buildings – that’s why they collapsed and killed so many people,” claimed González’s father-in-law, Marciel Edilberto Llarve, who lived in OPPE 33, which also crumbled.

Llarve, whose wife remains buried there, compared his family’s move from a hillside shack to the new tower block to being unwittingly sent to the guillotine. “They took us from the poverty of life to the riches of death,” he said. “This building was made of jelly.”

As Maduro employed increasingly draconian tactics to survive protests, uprisings, and an assassination attempt, González said many OPPE 25 inhabitants concealed political opinions for fear of being reported by Socialist party neighborhood committee members and losing benefits, jobs, homes, or facing arrest.

His sister-in-law, Yolife Llarve, recalled exhilaration when residents flocked to polling stations during 2024’s presidential election hoping to vote Maduro out. “People were excited. They were happy. Lots of people thought it was the end. We were sure it was the end, until they announced the results,” Llarve said of the vote, which Maduro is widely believed to have stolen from opposition leader María Corina Machado.

Venezuela’s former dictator now languishes in a New York prison after being seized by US special forces in a dramatic 3 January raid. A wall painting near OPPE 25 quotes Maduro’s court statement. “I’m innocent. I’m a decent man. And I am still the president of my country,” it reads, though part of the mural crumbled during the earthquakes.

Trump unexpectedly backed Rodríguez after capturing her boss and has called her a “terrific person” helping US oil and mining companies in a country that was until recently anti-imperialist but many now consider a protectorate. The acting president’s political future looks uncertain amid widespread outrage over earthquake handling. One post-disaster poll showed 63% of Venezuelans disapproved of Rodríguez, while nearly half prioritized fresh elections over reconstruction, though some suspect the earthquakes will reduce pressure for a vote.

Rodríguez has defended her government’s “tireless” disaster response, attributing criticism to malicious media conspiracies from propaganda “laboratories.” She has also rejected claims that Chávez’s signature housing projects were shoddily built, stating most fallen buildings were commercial developments.

Genatios believes the earthquakes and aftermath exposed how “the revolution was a lie.” “Venezuela’s government is utterly failed, with less and less public support,” he said. “Its revolutionary rhetoric about helping the poor … is a facade completely detached from reality … There’s absolutely no revolution [any more] – their motivation is basically just money and power. There’s no revolution. Nothing. It doesn’t exist.”

Rodríguez Guanire echoed these sentiments while taking a break from digging for her mother in OPPE 25’s rubble-clogged entrance. “I think people have had enough … We’ve had 27 years of this plague,” she said of Chavismo, predicting the regime’s eventual fall.

“I feel like [the earthquakes] were a Pandora’s box or the straw that broke the camel’s back, so everyone can see that enough is enough with what is happening in Venezuela,” added Rodríguez Guanire, wearing a white mask against toxic dust and the sickly scent of death.

Moments later, a government ambulance arrived at OPPE 33 after reports of a survivor trapped under 12 layers of concrete slabs. The emergency vehicle bore a photo of a grinning Nicolás Maduro, though vandals had peeled away chunks of the fallen dictator’s face. All around the ambulance, buildings, and Chávez’s revolution, lay in ruins.

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