When the ground started shaking under Caracas on Wednesday evening, Maria Alejandra was inside her apartment building, watching the walls crack around her. She and her neighbours had to force the door open through the dust and debris before climbing down past rubble to reach the street. “The scene was like a horror movie,” she later told Reuters. She was one of the millions who never left even as more than 7.7 million Venezuelans fled the country over the past decade, escaping hyperinflation, shortages and political turmoil that gutted entire neighbourhoods.
Two earthquakes struck Venezuela within roughly 40 seconds of each other a 7.2 magnitude foreshock followed almost immediately by a 7.5 magnitude mainshock, both centred near Yaracuy and Carabobo states, roughly 100 miles west of the capital. Seismologists call this a “doublet” of two major quakes so close together that survivors often don’t register them as separate events, only as one endless, violent shudder. It is the most powerful earthquake to hit Venezuela in more than a century, since a 7.7 magnitude quake in 1900 struck the same northern coastline.
The shaking reached Caracas, La Guaira, Miranda, Carabobo and Trujillo, and was felt as far away as Colombia and Brazil’s Amazon basin, more than a thousand miles from the epicenter. In the capital’s Altamira neighbourhood, a 22-storey building collapsed entirely. Acting President Delcy Rodríguez said at least 32 people are confirmed dead and 700 injured a toll that doesn’t yet include incoming figures from La Guaira, the coastal state she described as the hardest hit, and one she expects to climb. Caracas’s main international airport shut down, and the Ministry of Education said some schools would be converted into shelters and donation centres.
What makes this disaster particularly cruel is who it has landed on. Venezuela’s migration crisis, one of the largest displacement events in modern Latin American history, was never an equal-opportunity exodus. Those with savings, skills, or family abroad tended to leave first. Those who remain are disproportionately the elderly, the poor, and people too tied to ageing property or sick relatives to start over in Bogotá, Lima or Madrid. Many of the buildings that crumbled on Wednesday were constructed decades before modern seismic codes existed, the kind of older housing stock that disaster experts say is consistently the most vulnerable when a major quake hits a developing economy.
The earthquake also struck a country still finding its footing after an extraordinary upheaval of its own making. Just months earlier, in January, US forces captured then-president Nicolás Maduro in a military operation and flew him to New York to face drug-trafficking charges. Rodríguez, his former deputy, was sworn in as acting president still loyal to Maduro’s movement, but now also navigating a delicate, watched-over relationship with Washington. It is a government barely settled into its own transition, now also responsible for coordinating a national disaster response.
That complicated history made Wednesday night’s American response notable. The same administration that sanctioned Venezuelan officials for years, and whose military removed the country’s president by force in January, is now the one mobilising search-and-rescue teams and humanitarian convoys toward Caracas. Trump called it “a devastating number of deaths” on social media and pledged that “all agencies” of the US government were readying to help. The State Department said it had activated a disaster assistance task force coordinating with the interim Venezuelan government. For a country whose recent history with the US has swung between confrontation and uneasy cooperation, the earthquake has forced an unlikely moment of alignment.
A tsunami advisory was briefly issued for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands before being lifted within the hour, but for Venezuelans, the more lasting damage is closer to home in families still missing relatives, in a coastal state Rodríguez is calling “a true tragedy,” in residents who, even after sunset on Wednesday, stayed outside their homes, too afraid of aftershocks to go back in. Caracas has survived devastating earthquakes before in 1812, an estimated 30,000 people died; in 1967, roughly 240. Each time, the city was rebuilt. This time, it will have to rebuild with fewer hands, a hollowed-out middle class, a government still finding its feet, and a population whose strongest instinct, for over a decade now, has been to leave rather than stay and fix what’s broken.
For those who stayed, like Maria Alejandra, leaving was never really the choice they had. Staying was. On Wednesday, that choice came at a cost they never signed up for.
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