CARACAS, Venezuela — Two massive earthquakes struck Venezuela on June 24, killing more than 4,300 people, injuring nearly 17,000 and leaving thousands more missing as the rescue effort turned into a grim recovery operation across La Guaira and parts of Caracas.
The back-to-back quakes, measuring 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude, struck within seconds of each other, flattening high-rise apartment blocks and whole working-class districts. The 7.5 quake was the strongest to hit Venezuela in more than a century.
The official death toll reached 4,333 by July 11, with 16,740 injured and thousands still missing. Over 1.3 million people are in urgent need of medical aid, while direct physical damage to housing and infrastructure has been estimated at $37 billion.
The disaster has laid bare not simply the violence of the earth, but the violence of imperialism, dependency, and revisionist betrayal. Earthquakes do not choose class targets, capitalism does. It decides which buildings are reinforced, which hospitals have supplies, which workers live in unsafe housing, and which oppressed countries are strangled until every crisis becomes a massacre.
Over 58,000 buildings may have been damaged or destroyed, as extreme pressure on health services, growing surgical backlogs, and increased risk of disease outbreaks weigh down on hospitals and clinics struggling under catastrophe.
In La Guaira, survivors dug through rubble with their hands while families waited outside collapsed buildings for word of the living and the dead. Aid arrived late in the hardest-hit areas. Heavy equipment was scarce during the critical early rescue period.
The working people responded before the state did. Volunteers set up aid stations, distributed water, food and clothing, opened lodging and dug for survivors. This mass initiative exposed the bankruptcy of the Rodríguez clique, which postures as defender of the people while police and soldiers stood over a disaster they could neither prevent nor manage.
The so-called Bolivarian order left capitalist relations, comprador property and bureaucratic command intact. The result was a country where much of the infrastructure remained unprepared for major seismic shocks despite Venezuela’s known earthquake risk, with 80 percent of the population living above the boundary between the Caribbean and South American tectonic plates.
Imperialism has moved quickly to turn the ruins into an opening. U.S. sanctions, first imposed under the Obama regime and intensified after 2017, have devastated Venezuela’s ability to import medicine, machinery and supplies, leaving medical workers without basic equipment to treat crushed limbs. At the same time, the disaster has been used to expand military control through the militarization of La Guaira, permit restrictions on entry into the disaster zone, U.S. Southern Command forces operating openly in the region, U.S. military control over air traffic operations at Maiquetía International Airport, and armed Marines walking the streets under the cover of aid.
The Rodríguez clique has answered national humiliation with submission. It begs for the release of stolen assets while leaving the masses without organized power. It denounces imperialism in speeches while accepting the occupation of ports, airports and streets.
The Venezuelan masses need medicine, food, shelter, water, rescue equipment, reconstruction materials and control over rebuilding. They do not need U.S. troops. They do not need IMF vultures. They do not need a rotten clique managing disaster from above while workers carry bodies in garbage bags below.
The imperialists and their lackeys must be driven out of the ports, government halls and streets. Their sanctions must be lifted, aid must be placed in the hands of the masses, and reconstruction must be wrested from the same bureaucrats and foreign powers that sacrificed the people. Venezuela’s sovereignty cannot be defended by collaboration with U.S. Imperialism, or by the rotten maneuvers of the Rodríguez clique. Only through the organized struggle of the masses against the aggressor and every comprador who makes peace with them can the people be set free.
