Transcript of The Fallout of Massive Earthquakes for Venezuela — and the U.S. New

From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroeff. This is The Daily.

Hola, Carlos.

Hola, Natasha. Mucho gusto. ¿Cómo estás tú?

Bueno, estoy completa y totalmente agotada.

Last week, after two massive earthquakes struck Venezuela, my colleague Carlos Prieto started calling people there.

Okay, perfecto. Entonces voy a empezar a grabar.

Carlos is from Venezuela. He spent his childhood in the capital, Caracas. But when he started to see pictures and videos of the damage, he realized he couldn't even recognize parts of his hometown. So he asked people how it all started.

I was actually at my best friend's house, and I was going back to my house.

Natasha Villa was driving when the ground started to move.

I started feeling my car just sliding from side to side. I thought that it was the feeling of when you're driving on top of water. So you feel like the car is just sliding. You could see people screaming and running out of the street. You could see the light post and the electrical post falling down in the street and the people screaming while the electricity sparkles were just going everywhere.

She had no idea how extensive the damage was.

I didn't have signal in my phone at all because the network had fallen completely.

With power outages all over the country and phone lines collapsed—

There was no way to communicate with my friends.

Much of Venezuela didn't know either.

We had no idea what was happening. So I waited for a friend who had a car, and we drove around the city trying to find a signal.

Carlos Yalambi is a comedian. He was supposed to perform at a stand-up show that night.

So yeah, once we found the signal—

When he finally got access to the internet, he couldn't believe what was coming up on his phone.

What was the first thing that you saw?

The first thing I saw was, like, some buildings collapsed. And we have some friends who live next to the first building that fell off in Caracas. Like, hey, our friend is alive, but probably a lot of people in the building next to him Or not.

And then he saw more.

Then as we checked the news, we saw, "Oh, okay, so that was not the only building that fell." He saw building after building collapse in Caracas.

But nothing prepared him for what had happened in La Guaira, a state on the country's northern coast.

And then we saw La Guaira videos, and it was too much.

As more and more images trickled out, a horrific picture of ruin began to emerge. La Guaira is normally a popular vacation spot, but now entire blocks had turned to rubble. Thousands and thousands of people were looking for their loved ones.

The first thing I thought was, the city is lost.

Um, just today I went over to the Domingo Luciani Hospital, where I saw with my own eyes the level of devastation. I saw trucks, pickup trucks carrying patients directly from La Guaira. There was a 4-year-old girl that had her pelvis exposed that was arriving at the same time. And I was there.

Hmm.

It— there's no way to describe it.

Today, we look at how Venezuelans united. After the earthquakes, and talk to our colleague Anatoly Karmanayev from La Guaira about how the aftermath of the tragedy has forced the Trump administration to shift its plans in Venezuela. It's Thursday, July 2nd. So Anatoly, you got to Venezuela on Sunday and you've been spending a lot of time in the part of the country most affected by these earthquakes, which is La Guaira. So just tell me what you've seen.

So La Guaira is a gateway to Venezuela. It's this town outside of capital Caracas, and I have driven there hundreds of times. This is Anatoly. This is Monday afternoon, and I'm sitting in the back of a passenger car. Early this week, I made this drive again, and it was a very different drive this time. Wow, the line. There was a lot of traffic. There was a lot of people going down into the city. In front of me is a pickup truck loaded up with mattresses. Motorbikes and cars, trucks. Carrying supplies, carrying water. Just passed a motorbike driver with just a small bag full of groceries. It was quite an unusual sight. But apart from that, everything around you looked very much the same, the same as always. We're entering La Guaira. And it wasn't until you get into the city itself that you start to see widespread destruction.

Wow.

Yeah, this is the first high-rise that's badly damaged that I've seen. Blocks just entirely leveled. Wow, the walls are blown out, got broken, left people's possessions just hanging out. And it's the sort of seeming apparent randomness of it, right? That one block could be completely unscathed, even the glass and the paint is still there, and then the next, you know, few meters down the road is just completely leveled buildings. I'm standing on top of a collapsed building. And when you approached a destroyed building, the first thing that hits you is the smell, the smell of rot, the putrefaction. It was just very clear smell of decayed flesh.

Wow.

There's dozens of people around me. I'm digging through in various parts and hoping to find someone. You know, I have been a foreign correspondent for many years and I have covered a lot of unrest. I have been around death, but I have never covered a natural disaster of this scale, and I have never really thought about how death smells. And this was very much it. Like, this was very clear to me that this is what death smells like. Sitting on the side of a collapsed large residential building. There were people digging through pretty much every collapsed building. A few relatives standing on the side of a road with The earthquake happened a few days before I arrived, so the chances of finding someone alive have faded a lot by the time I was there. It's a lone excavator digging through the rubble. It feels a bit quixote, like taking out a glass of sand from the beach.

What do we know about the numbers, Anatoly, of the dead and of the missing? Where does that stand right now?

So the official death toll is around 2,000 people by now. And yesterday, the government suggested that it could rise to about 10,000.

Wow.

There are no reliable estimates of missing, but some, you know, the crowdsourcing platforms put the number at about 50,000. We should not take that too seriously. There's a lot of caveats here. Here, you know. But I think it is not unlikely that the number of deaths will end up being in 5 digits.

Okay, so really heavy, just a horrific scene. What is your understanding of how this happened, of what led to the scale of destruction and of death?

So first of all, Natalie, these were very powerful earthquakes, objectively powerful, that would have caused destruction in many places around the world, if not most. This was twin earthquakes, a very unusual set of circumstances, and they also occurred during a public holiday. This was like an unusually very busy time for the area that ended up suffering the most. So widespread destruction and death was perhaps unavoidable, but there are growing questions being asked whether decisions made by the governments have contributed to the destruction. Many of the destroyed buildings, or many of buildings that appear to have caused the most have been social housing, which has been very rapidly built in the last 15, 20 years to meet political objectives. They were basically built around election time to garner votes, and there's growing indications that corners were cut in building those buildings.

This was under Nicolás Maduro, the previous president of Venezuela.

This was under Nicolás Maduro, but this was primarily under his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, who won numerous elections by gaining the support of Venezuela's poor, Venezuela's majority. And his flagship project was something called Gran Misión Vivienda, the grand housing project, which involved the construction of thousands of buildings, thousands of social housing blocks around the country, which were then given out to Venezuela's poor. And many of these buildings have collapsed.

Hmm.

Okay. So there are questions over whether that strategy led by Chávez, continued under Maduro, may have created the conditions for this level of destruction.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, Venezuela has a history of heavy seismic activity. This is an earthquake-prone zone. This is not a secret. And statistical models have predicted a strong earthquake here for some years. This is a country that should have been prepared. And to be fair, many buildings have withstood the earthquake very well. Entire neighborhoods have sort of came out of this pretty much unscathed. So there are construction engineering reasons coming from decisions taken by Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. But there were also decisions taken by the country's current leader, Delcy Rodríguez, that have contributed to the ineffective response.

Like, what, what do you mean by that?

So before Delsi Rodríguez became the leader of the government, she has been a long-term official of this regime. She has really risen in the ranks of the government under Nicolás Maduro, who made her his economic troubleshooter, given her responsibility for the country's oil industry with the job of helping him stay in power. And she has orchestrated this great shift from the socialist principles that have powered the ruling movement since its foundation towards this laissez-faire, hands-off economic approach.

More of an open market.

More of an open market. And this is what it looks like in practice. Under Hugo Chávez, the state had lavish citizens with goods and services in return for political loyalties. There was free food, free housing, subsidized travel, and all sorts of social benefits for any aspect of your life you can imagine—for education, for your house pets, for the elderly, for university students, etc., etc. And this was a time of economic plenty in the country. Oil prices were high, oil experts were earning the country billions and billions of dollars, and Hugo Chavez could afford that. Then the oil prices collapse in 2014, American sanctions start strangling the country's economy, and this becomes no longer sustainable. And Delcy, as Nicolás Maduro's economic chief, makes the decision to retreat the state from people's lives. So the Venezuelan state gradually stops providing basic services that they have for many decades. The people are left on their own to fend for themselves. You know, in Russia we I was saying, the survival of a drowning is the business of a drowning. And this is what Delcy Institute said. You guys have the best sayings in Russia. And in return, the government gave them some breathing space to do that.

So it stopped harassing businesses by and large. It stopped the expropriations. It loosened currency control. It just made it easier for people to go about their daily lives. Right. It's unleashed in a way market forces of supply and demand to try to fill in the gaps left by the retreating states. And it did not create this massive bonanza. It did not create a Dubai out of Caracas, but it did make people's lives significantly easier. But there was a cost to that. There was, in a way, a hidden cost because the retreat of the state meant that the state no longer was in charge of providing basic services like telecommunications or even electricity in some cases. The state shrank, the state hollowed out. It was— everyone was for themselves. And that was fine at times of relative stability because people's entrepreneurship, private initiatives could help people get by. But when a natural disaster strikes and it requires a mass coordinated state response, the shortcomings of her policies became very much apparent.

You're saying that under Chávez and then Maduro, obviously it was by no means perfect, but all of the resources were under the control of the government. And so if the government needed to move quickly to respond to something like a disaster, you'd imagine it could. And then the move under Delcy to a more open market system, it kind of splits these state functions up and they retreat from providing the services that you need when something like this happens.

That's exactly what happened. And there, there's also a second reason Maduro especially in his last years in power. As he became increasingly unpopular, he became increasingly paranoid. He was worried about coups, he was worried about rebellions, anything that could topple him from power. And he became very distrustful of his own government, people who could organize and push him out from power. So he started atomizing Venezuelan state. And by this I mean he splits it into little fiefdoms controlled by different officials, you know, who enrich themselves. And none of them are able to communicate with each other or organize with each other, uh, and this makes it very difficult to organize a coup. But it also, in circumstances like now, makes it very difficult for all these different institutions— the police, the military, the civil protection services, the healthcare system, etc.— to get together, to coordinate, and do something together. This is precisely what is needed during an earthquake. And instead, we just have all these small groups of people running around aimlessly because there was nothing that ties them together.

Okay, so basically both of these things, the economic shift and the political paranoia of Maduro, lead to a very disorganized state. And then we get this other massive shift, as we all know, when the United States goes in under Trump and extracts Maduro earlier this year. Talk about that and how it affected what we're seeing now.

This made things even more complicated because now it's not Delsie who ultimately made decisions in Minnesota. It is Washington. It is this Trump administration. So it adds another layer of decision-making, another layer of bureaucracy, and complicates the chain of command. And this is not what you want during a disaster response.

Just explain what you mean when you say that it's the Trump administration making decisions?

So, Natalie, the strange thing about this is, is basically exactly what it sounds like. You know, this is one of his rare things. This is not a metaphor. The US has direct control over Venezuela's public revenues. The US has massive influence over Venezuela's political systems, over its economic decisions. So it is literally Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State, and his team that make everyday decisions, how Venezuela is run and what happens in Venezuela, what stances it takes.

That is just so wild, that setup. Totally unimaginable, even, you know, 6 months ago.

Yeah, it was— Natalie, it was definitely something I could not have imagined. You know, yesterday I was in La Guaira, and for part of the day I was in the airports, in the country's airport, which has been damaged. There's no commercial traffic, but there's a lot of aid supplies coming in there. And this is also where US military set up its base. So it was this really bizarre scene that I witnessed of a senior Venezuelan security official, a man called Granco Arteaga, who has been US nemesis. You know, he's a man accused of gross human rights violation, torture, killing of political opponents. And he has been sought by US governments for many years. And here he was standing and calmly looking on US military helicopters helicopters taking on and off from an airport a few hundred yards in front of them. And it was, it was just so surreal to see US military power, which has been, you know, the nemesis of Venezuelan government for decades, for decades, just having complete free rein on Venezuelan airfield in front of me. Okay.

You're getting at this right now, but how does this new government structure in Venezuela and the partnership with the US affect the response to these quakes?

So when the quakes hit, the government is caught completely flat-footed. It is unclear what's happening. And for the first 24 hours, which are the crucial hours, the hours where you're most likely to find survivors, there's no organized response, very little of organized response. We've seen very little heavy machinery on the streets. We've seen very little, you know, organized groups of civil servants, you know, there's sort of very sporadic statements from the government. And, you know, people feel completely abandoned. People feel on their own. And they have no choice but to take matters into their own hands.

We'll be right back.

The first 24 hours after the earthquake that we started sending food directly to La Guaira, there were practically no rescue missions. There were no military on the street. There were no police officers. There was no help. There were so many places where the people were screaming from inside of the rubble, but there was absolutely nothing that they could do because there was no machinery. I know of a friend that she spent those 48 hours looking at the rubble where her father was buried, and there was no one there to help.

Everyone that our producer Carlos talked to, they couldn't sit still as all this was happening.

I went to the store and bought—

So they started either sending food or supplies down the stretch of highway to La Guaira, or going there themselves to help in any way they could.

Every day we wake up and went down to give it to the people that were working on the fall beam.

Often they were the first people that survivors had seen.

I'm curious if there has been a moment where you've noticed that maybe you are the first person that someone there has seen come for help.

Many, many, many times. So many families have suffered. So many people have had many days without talking to their families. So many people have lost everything, and, um, they were just happy to be alive, to save maybe one of their kids. What have they told you when they see you? It's amazing. You maybe talk with some— someone for less than 5 minutes And when you're going to say goodbye, you say goodbye with a hug. Like, it just feels so grateful. A lot of people from abroad started messaging me, asking me to reach their families. Like, the mom of one of our friends in Argentina was missing. He started like asking, hey, if you know any info about my mom, please let us know.

Carlos, the comedian, got multiple calls from people begging him to help locate their loved ones. Two friends had the same plea: could he help them find their mothers who'd gone missing in La Guaira?

So we went on two motorcycles.

So Carlos and a few friends got on their motorcycles and headed toward the worst of the earthquake.

To try to find two moms. So we tried to reach for the first mom, but when we actually reached the building, and the building was completely collapsed.

Do you think that she didn't make it?

Yeah, I would say so. I would say it's the, the most probable case. And like the person, like she kind of knows it. Like she kind of knows it, that it's a long shot. So yeah. But when we reach these places, like the people told us, hey, nobody's coming here. And We see that there is nobody around. Like, most civilians helping in those places are the civilians that live in those places.

So Anatoly, in the last few days, our colleague, Daily producer Carlos Prieto, has been talking to people who are doing just what you said, actively jumping in as volunteers with no experience, just mounting their own pretty incredible rescue efforts. Just talk to me high level about that civilian effort. What is the scale and scope of it?

Natalie, it's nothing short of remarkable and simply overwhelming. I would not call it a silver lining given the scale of a human tragedy, but to see every single Venezuelan you meet contributing something, jumping in, has literally brought, like, tears to my eyes. You know, it's the universality of this effort. The rich, the poor, just all cooking food, delivering supplies, donating, you know, opening up their houses, providing transports, digging through the rubble. It's just been remarkable. And, you know, Natalie, like, we have been foreign correspondents for many years. We have covered a lot of authoritarian governments. And the rulebook of all these autocrats is to atomize society. Totally. To divide the society, to turn it into these isolated pockets that are unable to stand together, unable to do any collective action, including changing the government. Right. This is how Putin works. This is how Maduro works. And this is a government that has been in power for more than 20 years, and it has systematically undermined people's ability to make their voice count. And the way people here have responded, the way they have come together to do something meaningful has been just absolutely overwhelming.

You're saying basically that strategy didn't work because here people are gathering in this way.

The strategy didn't work. And, you know, obviously it's a testament to the will of its own people. But at the end of the day, these are just regular people facing a massive catastrophe, and they are putting Band-Aids on a massive problem that will not be solved without organized state involvement.

And once that organized state involvement comes, I assume it does start to materialize at some point. What did it look like?

Well, it is beginning to materialize, Natalie. You know, the financial aid is flowing in, supplies are flowing in. There's a growing number of international volunteers, servicemen who are helping out. There's talk of multilateral organizations providing loans, providing financing. And by this stage, Natalie, we are no longer really talking about search and rescue by and large. We're talking longer-term reconstruction.

And what about the partnership, this now very close collaboration with the United States, did that help? It did.

It absolutely did. I think it would be fair to say that for all the questions that exist about US-Venezuelan relationship today, questions that have to do with morality, national sovereignty, international law, it is very clear that without US involvement, the situation on the ground would have been even worse. It has flown in a lot of supplies, its logistical muscles, the use of transport, helicopters, etc., has been very important. Today, there are already 900 American soldiers on the ground in Venezuela helping with recovery efforts. The US has already committed $300 million of aid to Venezuela. US is pushing to reintegrate Venezuela into international organizations that can provide long-term lending. So there's absolutely questions about whether The US could do more, but in absolute terms, its response has been significant.

And that significant response, I'd imagine, has the Trump administration deepening its connection to the current government, right?

Absolutely. My reporting shows that after the earthquake, the US has communicated to Delcy Rodríguez that they are all in, that they have made a bet on her, they have made a bet on this alliance, and they are going to lean into it. US officials have lavished praise on Delcy and, you know, her response repeatedly in public statements. Just yesterday, the US government said in a statement that Venezuelan government has agreed to all of their requests that they had after the earthquake, which is very interesting because it implies that the decisions are made by the US government and it's Venezuelans who just approve the decisions that have been taken. One of the perhaps unexpected consequences of this earthquake is this alliance has become a lot deeper in the last few days.

And what are the implications of that?

This matters because the US is working with a government that they themselves have labeled as illegitimate. They have labeled it as sponsors of what they call narco-terrorism, a government that has stolen elections and Until the earthquake, the US plan, as articulated repeatedly by Secretary of State Michael Rubio, involved 3 stages. First, the recovery of the economy, stabilization of its political system, and transition, which means political transitions, basically enabling free elections. And after the earthquake, Rubio himself admitted that the catastrophe complicates this plan, makes it more difficult. This is something that they didn't plan for. This is something they could not have planned for. And in practical terms, The concentration makes it harder to imagine free elections in any foreseeable future, makes it difficult to imagine Venezuela really recovering their democracy and recovering their political voice.

Okay, so I have to ask, what is the Venezuelan opposition saying about this post-earthquake phase where maybe elections are being kicked even further down the road?

So the earthquakes have put the forces opposed to the government of Delcy Rodríguez in a very difficult position. They're in a lose-lose situation. Because on the one hand, if they stand aside, they are basically watching the US deepening their alliance with their sworn enemies and pushing the can of elections down the road. At the same time, if they use the earthquake as an opportunity to reinsert themselves into Venezuela's political lives, they face accusations of opportunism, politicization of disaster, and of basically staging political stunts. And this dilemma is particularly acute for the leader of the Venezuelan opposition, Marie Corina Machado, Nobel Peace Prize laureate. She remains the most popular politician in the country. She's a person who would undoubtedly win elections if they were held tomorrow, but she's in exile. She left Venezuela last year to receive that prize, and she has been unable to come back since. So She is now watching from outside the country as the US makes their bet with Delcy Rodriguez. And frankly, you know, as a Venezuelan person, she's watching this tremendous suffering of her citizens. And naturally, she wants to be involved. She wants to help. And she has been trying to come back.

She does not have a valid passport. Her Venezuelan passport has expired. So she needs US help to get into the country. And she has been making increasingly forceful public pleas to aid her return.

She's saying to the US, help me get back in there. I want to help.

That's exactly what she's been saying. And her pleas to the US have massively backfired because they— US administrations, they see her as a destruction. They have moved from privately expressing annoyance over her pleas to now publicly saying that her campaign to return to the country is a political stunt because they say we remain focused on reconstruction, we remain focused on aid. And the US government for now has bought into the arguments of Venezuelan government that allowing the opposition back into the country would just stoke social tensions, could create violence, could create unrest. And this is not something that US government wants to see in Venezuela right now.

So the long and short of it is that this tragedy obviously has very high political stakes on all sides. The opposition wants to use this as an opportunity to assert itself. For Delsi Rodríguez, this is a chance to solidify its ties with the US even more and to presumably try to show that she's a competent leader in the worst of times. But also for the United States, this feels like an important moment. I mean, President Trump has touted what he's done in Venezuela as this huge win. He's based a lot of his foreign policy on what he sees as his success there. And here is this event that may be putting that idea to the test.

Winston Churchill once said, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." And there's so much at stake for everyone involved. For Delsi Rodríguez, either this crisis ends up tumbling her government, or she ends up establishing her legitimacy, ends up establishing herself as the powerful rule of Venezuela. For the opposition, either they reinsert themselves into Venezuelan political life and use the discontent with government response to take power, or they fade into obscurity in exile. And for the Trump administration, this is a crucial test of a narrative that the Venezuelan operation has been an unfettered success, that this has been the biggest foreign policy achievement of Trump's second term. He has repeatedly said that Venezuela Venezuela has now become a very happy country, that Venezuelans are dancing on the street. And the reality is that today Venezuelans are not dancing on the streets. Many of them are living on the streets, right? The images that are coming out of the country clash massively with the way that he has painted this relationship, right? So he now has to take action to create what he has been talking about, right? He now has to take ownership in a way for the situation in Venezuela.

And what will happen in Venezuela in the next few months and years to a great extent will depend on the decisions that he will make in the coming weeks.

What about for Venezuelans? I have to think that the stakes for them are much more urgent. Life or death. Like, the question is whether they can feel safe living in this country under the system, given the response to this tragedy.

The tragedy has unleashed a great amount of pain and suffering, but it has also made Venezuelans rediscover their voice and given them bravery to speak out. In La Guaira, you see residents coming together to express their anger at government officials, to chase them out, to boo them. There's a sense of confidence, and at the same time, a sense of anger and rage. And it's anger at being abandoned by the government at this moment of great need, and at the corruption and incompetence that we've seen all around them. But it's a trigger for the pain that they have experienced for the last 20 years living under this government, right? This is sort of like a cathartic moment in a way, right? That everything that's been bubbling up inside Venezuelan people for so many years that they have been afraid to say because of repression, because of lack of independent media. This is all now coming out. So perhaps the greatest paradox of what we see in Venezuela right now is that while the material conditions for elections and democracy are moving further away, people in power have more and more reasons to just kick the can down the road, the desire for democracy, the desire for political voice has risen dramatically.

People really want it. People are no longer willing to wait for it. And I also think what we see now is Venezuelans rediscovering that they are not alone, that they're part of a larger community. And I think, you know, this earthquake will have big consequences for Venezuelan society, for Venezuelan people as a whole, because they have seen the power of their collective action and what they can do together despite all the challenges.

Well, Anatoly, thank you so much.

Thanks as always.

So when you think about that mom, the first mom that you couldn't find, were you— were you afraid that you also might not find this other mom?

Oh, of course. But as we reached the place, We went to the bus stop that is closest to the house where she was seen, and we have no signal, we have no way of knowing, like, the actual street because it goes up, like, to the slums. So we ask somebody at this bus stop, like, hey, where is this street? And they told us, oh, it's right here. Who are you looking for? And we say her name. And the man we ask tells us, well, yes, I'm her brother. Oh wow. Yeah, it was, yeah, too much luck. Like, yes, of course, I'm her brother. Do you want to come visit her? And we were like, yes, please, we have to send a video to our friend. And he took us to the home and she was there. She's okay. She's okay. Yeah, she's okay. There was just like no way to communicate in, but Yeah, she's okay. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. On Wednesday, a team at the University of Minnesota announced that it had taken a major step toward achieving something that scientists have long dreamed of: discovering how chemicals can be turned into life. The researchers blended together dozens of ingredients and synthesized simple cells that can can feed, grow, and reproduce, passing along their genetic material to future generations. While those cells may not technically be fully alive, they have most of the basic components necessary for life. Scientists hope that synthetic cells may someday be engineered to do things that natural cells can't, like making new kinds of medicine or drawing large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The biologist leading the team called her creation "Spud Cell" because of its potato-like appearance. Today's episode was produced by Carlos Prieto, Lindsey Garrison, Anna Foley, Chris Benderev, and Eric Krupke. It was edited by Michael Benoit and Chris Haxel, and contains music by Marian Lozano, Alicia Betitup, Dan McElroy, John Powell, Rowan Nimistow, and Pat McCusker. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kitroeff. See you tomorrow.