Venezuela’s earthquake recovery is complicated by an earlier disaster

As Venezuela seeks to recover from twin earthquakes Wednesday — with magnitudes of 7.2. and 7.5, respectively — that killed at least 920 people, injured thousands and have caused extensive damage, the fallout from another natural disaster, and the U.S. response to it back then, is instructive for what happens next today.

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In December 1999, torrential rains sent walls of mud and rock down the mountains onto Vargas, the coastal strip between Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, and the sea now known as La Guaira. Death toll estimates run from 10,000 to 30,000 — the exact figure remains unknown. In the aftermath of what is still considered the deadliest natural disaster in modern Venezuelan history, Washington offered to help. U.S. Navy engineers and Marines began steaming toward Venezuela aboard the USS Tortuga, with bulldozers and the equipment to help clean and rebuild a shattered region.

But Hugo Chávez, not trusting the U.S. and fearing a loss of sovereignty and political power, turned away the aid deployment. Venezuelans have paid for that ego-based miscalculation ever since.

Today, Venezuela is run by the successor to Chávez’s regime. Since the Jan. 3 operation that removed Nicolás Maduro from power — and brought him and his wife, Cilia Flores, to face charges in U.S. courts — the U.S. has conducted military operations inside Venezuela, taken effective control of its oil revenue and acquired extraordinary leverage over the acting president, Delcy Rodríguez. The constraint that bound Chávez in 1999 — the political cost of being too close to the U.S. — no longer applies. Washington can dictate terms.

Yet while some things have changed in Venezuela since Jan. 3, two crucial issues have not. The first is the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe that is daily life for millions. Years of mismanagement and the regime’s kleptocracy hollowed out the country long before the 1999 disaster; afterward, supplies never reached hospitals, there were chronic shortages of food and basic medicines, and the health system could not reliably deliver basic services. The mismanagement and corruption of Chavismo intensified after Maduro came to power in 2013.

After I became the U.S. chief of mission in July 2018, I visited hospitals in Caracas and in other states and checked on school feeding programs in tough neighborhoods. Together with the U.S. Agency for International Development, we at the embassy documented children who were stunted from lack of calories and the number of people who died in hospitals due to lack of medicines. The aid that did arrive was politicized.

In February 2019, for example, the United States sent C-17s laden with food and medicine to Cúcuta, Colombia, to help the Venezuelan people. Maduro’s response? He ordered the bridge connecting the two countries blockaded and sent Iris Varela, the head of the prison ministry (and current National Assembly member), into the streets with armed thugs to stop the delivery of supplies. Most of the supplies were burned in chaotic protests generated by the regime. At the time, Rodríguez claimed there was no humanitarian crisis. A mere two years later, Maduro welcomed the United Nations World Food Program to help feed hungry schoolchildren, but only if his regime could decide where the food would go. 

That hunger and need for healthcare has not been ameliorated. Even before Wednesday, the U.N. counted nearly 8 million Venezuelans in need of humanitarian assistance. The Rodríguez government’s energy has gone elsewhere — toward oil and gas contracts, mining concessions and a steady cadence of memorandums of understanding that outline future oil and gas deals but have so far led to little money moving to Venezuela, much less to its exhausted people. And now the strongest earthquakes to strike Venezuela in more than a century have further fractured the populace.