At 3:55 a.m. on June 25, a flicker of cellular service allowed Carlos to send word to the outside world from the rubble of his home in La Guaira that he and his family had survived the twin earthquakes that shook Venezuela’s capital region hours earlier. “For now, I’m in a makeshift shelter near where my house used to be,” he wrote. “We’re trying to help and rescue our neighbors.” Then the service went out again.
In the days that followed, Carlos, his neighbors, state workers, and thousands of Venezuelans dug through rubble and what remained of their homes to pull out their family, friends, and neighbors – both those who survived, and those who did not (6,462 and 6,509 respectively, according to latest official figures). Thousands more sought refuge where they could, with the largest shelter, Caribbean Maritime University, reporting an estimated 4,000 or more people in the early days (down to 2,600 within a week as other shelters were set up to provide more dignified conditions or as survivors found other housing solutions, and 830 as of late August).
“It was severely overpopulated, with families sleeping in the hallways and anywhere they could fit, but we couldn’t close the door to anyone who needed help,” Carlos, who is currently the director of the Narciso Gonell Temporary Shelter as well as a member of the Communard Union and the director of security for the Ministry of Communes, told me.
Many of the officials in La Guaira tasked with this responsibility had also been killed by the earthquakes – including half of the directors in the governors’ office – adding yet another layer of challenge to rescue and recovery efforts. “Despite the fact that the regional government lost a significant part of its cabinet, those who took on this work were on the ground doing what had to be done,” Juan, a state worker at the Narciso Gonell Temporary Shelter, told me. Furthermore, he explained, “forty-nine communal councils [organized neighborhoods] completely disappeared,” and with them cadre who had been trained by years of the revolution. Nonetheless, the existing organization built over the more than two decades of the Bolivarian Revolution made a significant impact on the efficacy of rescue and relief efforts. Juan explained that in less organized buildings – disproportionately the more luxurious, privately built ones – rescue efforts were more difficult. “People there didn’t know their neighbors. It’s not like that in the communes, where everyone knows their neighbor and where they live.”
Despite tremendous losses, within days of the earthquakes, a combination of state support, grassroots organizing structures, and the social fabric built during the revolution created more shelters, services, and support systems for the tens of thousands of survivors left unhoused, or protegidos (the protected), as they are referred to in the government’s campamentos transitorios (temporary shelters). By 17 July, 107 shelters were created that housed 21,235 protegidos (with a capacity for 25,282), many of which are schools.
This terminology reflects a foundational priority in Venezuela’s temporary shelters, which must not only provide housing, food, and adequate sanitary conditions, but also a sense of normalcy, care, and dignity. Every meal is planned with nutritionists, with Sundays featuring a special family meal and activities. Psychologists come to the shelters two to three times a week and offer individual counseling. A daily and weekly schedule features activities for protegidos, especially for children. Common agreements outline quiet hours, prohibit the consumption of alcohol, and enforce a zero-tolerance policy for gender-based violence. Regular inventory is taken of the supplies needed for protegidos, which is reported upwards and then restocked. Defined roles outline who is responsible for each of the tasks required to maintain a clean, safe, and caring environment, with many of the protegidos signing up as volunteers to assist in tasks from cooking and cleaning to reconstruction and renovation work in the shelters.
The Narciso Gonell Temporary Shelter
“When we arrived [in the Narciso Gonell school] on 30 June,” Juan told me, “we faced the huge challenge of adapting the infrastructure because it wasn’t suitable for people to live here for as long as it takes for them to be allocated their homes.” The high school lacked showers, mattresses, bunk beds, air conditioning, and other key infrastructure needed to provide temporary housing. It had also sustained damage during the earthquake, with cracks in the basketball court making it unsafe for children to play.
At the same time, the often well-intentioned but insufficiently organized drive to help was taking its toll. “People wanted to come and cheer up the children, but all of the sudden you had a kid who had eaten twenty lollipops running around on a sugar high until 3am. Despite good intentions, it was contributing to an overall state of anxiety,” Carlos explained. Within hours, however, the organizational structures built through the Bolivarian Revolution were put to use. Juan recounted how Franklin, a member of the Hugo Chávez Commune in La Guaira and a protegido at the Narciso Gonell shelter, was “among those who convinced people… to move from their tents to Maritime University [shelter] and then here [Narciso Gonell].” When some chose to remain in their tents, communards, protegidos, and state officials brought them water and other supplies. “All of those impacted collaborate here, organizing alongside the institutions” Franklin told me.
“The people in this shelter have taught us a lesson,” Juan continued. “And the lesson is that, when we’re organized – just as they are organized in their communes and communal councils – everything runs more smoothly; everything is easier.” Meanwhile, Carlos explained how unorganized volunteers ended up “re-victimizing people who had already been victims of the earthquake. They offered to donate but only if they could go up to [a protegido’s] room and physically hand the person an arepa, or a tamal, or clothing… But imagine, if ten people come to me, and there are ten people walking around their room…”
By the time I visited the Narciso Gonell Temporary Shelter in late August, the basketball court had been repaired and repainted; 80 of the 265 protegidos had signed up for scheduled volunteer tasks, with others stepping in to help regularly; children were given a nutritious daily merienda (snack) planned alongside the Ministry of Nutrition in lieu of dozens of lollipops, and solidarity brigades from across the country had arrived to meet the needs in the shelters, with state officials, communards, protegidos, and volunteers working hand in hand. As part of a commitment by the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV) to send brigades from every state in the country to help with the shelters, plumbers, civil engineers, and other specialists from Sucre state came to adapt and improve the space, working alongside communes, volunteers, and the Ministry of Public Works. They converted storage rooms into bathrooms with individual shower stalls; built a laundry room; expanded and improved the potable water system; installed air conditioners and a generator; weatherized windows; repaired and painted the walls and basketball court; expanded the kitchen; and more. Rooms that had two electrical outlets – sufficient to meet the classroom needs – were fitted with ten outlets to meet the needs of the families temporarily housed there and organized into demarcated sections for each family with new mattresses, bunk beds, and a closet. Once school is back in session in mid-September, that means that students will also benefit in the long-term from the improved infrastructure.
Other brigades from across the country brought doctors and nurses (many trained in Cuba), including specialists in pediatric and obstetric-gynecological care, as well as supplies of fresh fruits, vegetables, and meat donated to Narciso Gonell and other shelters by 72 communes across the country. Yet others brought rescue workers who came to assist in the search first for survivors and later for the dead. Others offered a variety of cultural activities, from live concerts to juggling acts. Brigade members work alongside protegidos, who themselves come from a range of professions: “we have everything here – hairdressers, firefighters, teachers, bricklayers…” Carlos told me. Each of these skills, alongside the needs and characteristics of each protegido, has been carefully recorded by the shelters’ coordinators, information that is both employed in the organization of the space as well as to report needs to relevant institutions Sandra, a single mother of three and who worked as a cook before the earthquakes, was one of those prioritized in the state-funded entrepreneurship program Emprender Juntos, which gives microloans to families to get back on their feet – “families that a bank would never give a loan to,” Carlos said. “[Sandra] used to get into fights with everyone,” a roommate confessed, but “she has completely changed. Now she’s all smiles.”
Humanitarian Aid and the Dispute for Dignity
“This is like our second family,” Amelia, a protegida and pre-school teacher, told me outside of the classroom-turned-beauty parlor in the Narciso Gonell shelter. “We hope that soon we’ll have our own dignified homes,” Carlos added, aware of the state of constant anxiety brought on by the uncertainty of the when, the where, and the how as the state builds a plan to provide housing for the tens of thousands of displaced, especially with schools set to reopen on September 14. “But we hope that we’ll get to be neighbors.” In the midst of massive loss and trauma, “this has been a gift from God,” Sandra’s roommate added.
Yet this “gift” has not been without its disputes. In the midst of the chaos, with 10,000 to 100,000 projected dead according to early estimates from the United States Geological Survey (USGS), NGOs, religious groups, and foreign government agencies from across the world flooded the country. “We gladly accept the materials and donations,” Carlos told me, but not at the expense of dignity and respect. “It’s not profitable to overcome the crisis,” he explained. “There is a territorial dispute: [many organizations] came with resources but refused to recognize our systems of organization. As we organized within our communes and the structures we’ve built, they told us no – we’re the ones in charge. They want to disarticulate the social fabric we’ve built.”
Furthermore, the practices of most NGOs clashed deeply with survivors and their families – notably with the uncompromising expectation of dignity and respect that has been woven into the fabric of Venezuelan society over the more than two decades of the revolution. For instance, in contrast with the regular psychological treatment offered at the shelters, reports proliferated of NGOs handing out anti-anxiety medicine like candy without adequately explaining to survivors what they were being given. You can’t sleep? Here, take this, they were told. Others reported that some non-profits arrived with lists of adoptive families, hoping to take children out of the country at a moment when entire households had been killed and extended families had not yet been able to determine who had survived or where they were.
While over twenty thousand earthquake survivors have sought refuge in the state’s temporary shelters, with the help of organized communities and volunteers like Francisco, there is also “a dispute for the people,” Juan Carlos, a member of the Communard Union, told me. As part of this dispute, a variety of religious organizations (especially evangelical churches), NGOs, and U.S. and other international agencies with varying motives have used the havoc wreaked by the twin earthquakes to attempt to “to dismantle popular organization.”
This is especially the case where concentrated clusters of informal tents have sprung up in affected areas such as Mar Abajo, La Guaira. Here, a sea of plastic tarps and tents stretch along the coastline bearing the names of organizations like Samaritan’s Purse, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) alongside canopies set up to distribute bags of food and a government canteen that provides three meals a day to 1,200 earthquake survivors. (It is worth noting that USAID, whose logo can be seen across the tent settlements, has a long history of intervention in Venezuela.)
In addition to the services provided by the government and communes, there is a “random handout” of aid, Justo, a leader of the Gran Cacique Mare Commune, explained. “There are some people [receiving aid] who aren’t even from here,” he continued. “They come from another area and want to get their hands on benefits. Sometimes they come at night and set up camp around here to see what’s being handed out to take away. Then they take their loot back there. It’s tough… When charities arrive that operate outside of our system of organization and lists, it’s a disaster.”
Justo, another member of the Gran Cacique Mare Commune and a protegido at the Mar Abajo Baseball Field Temporary Shelter, explained that his commune is made up of seven smaller communal councils, each with spokespeople and an organizational system. Through this system, he said, the commune seeks to “ensure that benefits are made collective and distributed to the whole community.” Domingo chimed in: “when the first aid arrived, there was nothing… Seeing that so many organizations were coming here, we quickly made a map of each sector.” He pointed to the color-coded map, which identifies the level of damage to each of the 1,616 homes in his commune as assessed by the presidential committee (red for ‘high risk’ or uninhabitable, yellow for restricted access, and green for homes deemed habitable) as well as the demographic breakdown: the age of each survivor, how many families remain, how many are living in tents or shelters, and the leaders in each of the seven communal councils. “We’re not totally organized yet,” Justo said. But, Domingo added, “we’re rebuilding our map of dreams.”
The Media, Economic Sabotage, and the Opportunity of Disaster
In this map are 720 “red” buildings – nearly half of the homes in the Gran Cacique Mare Commune in Mar Abajo, La Guaira – including Justo’s home. Justo explained that the extent of damage was due not only to the tremendous impact of the back-to-back 7.2 and 7.5 earthquakes, but also to the deterioration caused by a decade of the U.S.-led blockade. For instance, he explained, “ten years of the blockade meant that people couldn’t afford to invest in their homes, which affected many households. Our eternal enemy, the salt air (salitre), also had a huge impact on housing; it’s terribly corrosive. All of these factors compounded the impact of the twin earthquakes.”
The U.S.-led blockade includes more than 1,000 sanctions and unilateral coercive measures on Venezuela as well as forms of unconventional, or hybrid, war, which seek to pin the blame for widespread suffering on the Venezuelan government and thereby push the population to overthrow it without putting boots on the ground. To report on the damage wrought by the twin earthquakes while ignoring the systematic weakening of infrastructure and organization caused by the blockade – the very infrastructure and organization needed to save lives – is, at best, to lie by omission.
Another form of this unconventional war against Venezuela is an ongoing media campaign, which largely reported that the government was responsible for the extent of the devastation caused by the earthquakes, due, for instance, to allegedly poorly built public structures. However, within days it was reported that 80% of the collapsed structures were built by the private sector – the very sector that was strengthened when U.S. sanctions blocked the government from the international financial system. In other words, far from the image it presents of a good samaritan seeking to help a people in need, the U.S. in fact contributed to the devastation and death wrought by the earthquakes through years of economic and hybrid warfare.
In the wake of the twin earthquakes, as survivors grieve the loss of their loved ones, homes, and entire communities, videos proliferate of survivors decrying poor conditions, painting a picture of an absent state leaving victims to fend for themselves (not unlike the reality faced by Hurricane Katrina survivors in 2005 in New Orleans, United States, where I volunteered in reconstruction efforts as a high school student). Yet there are a number of different reasons that families have chosen to live in tents rather than in government shelters.
In some cases, families whose homes are undergoing repair and will be, but are not yet, inhabitable camp out nearby, knowing that they will move back in once the repairs are done (with at least 1,400 buildings repaired by the state so far). Others do not want to leave their neighborhoods, with no guarantee of which shelter they will be offered and, for those whose homes collapsed completely or are beyond repair (especially in zones along the faultline that may not be deemed safe for reconstruction), what return the reconstruction plan will offer them.
Other families have chosen to stay near the ruins of their homes and continue the search for the remains of their loved ones as the government continues to sort and remove rubble (with over 600,000 tons, or 28.61%, of the rubble cleared). The daughter of Domingo’s predecessor as the coordinator of the sala de autogobierno (self-governance room), Ruth, is among those who continue to sift through the rubble in hopes of providing her mother with a proper burial. “She was an incredible woman,” Domingo said. “It’s tragic. [Her daughter] has been looking for her in the rubble day and night for more than two months, but they haven’t been able to find her body… It’s like finding a needle in a haystack amid so much rubble.”
However, there is also a segment of the population that has been drawn into media and ideological warfare, vesting their hopes for the future in NGOs, religious organizations, and the U.S. – the very government that has strangled its economy, contributed to conditions that magnified the scale of the disaster, and bombed La Guaira and Caracas earlier this year during the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores. This is only one sector of a much larger population of tens of thousands of survivors who lost their homes, yet it is the only one reported with any frequency in the media. As Justo told me, there is a sustained effort to “create false perspectives and fake news… We have to find a way to dispel those myths.”
Behind the media and ideological campaign unfolding in La Guaira lie deeper geopolitical and economic interests. For one, Juan Carlos explained, La Guaira is “the most important port in Venezuela. [It] is useful to the Americans for economic reasons – for businesspeople who want to invest in tourism here, [and] to control the port.” In order to do this, he continued, the role of NGOs, religious organizations, and other foreign agencies is key in “exercising ideological control and cultural domination… to break with the communal fabric and social fabric” built over the years of the revolution. With a foothold in communities deepened through humanitarian aid in a moment of profound suffering and disaster, these organizations are better positioned to spread an ideology to ensure that “there is no resistance to [foreign] capital seeking to enter La Guaira.”
Furthermore, he pointed out, La Guaira is a key tourist destination thirty minutes from the capital, Caracas; near an international airport; and home to some of the country’s most beautiful beaches, surrounded by the Waraira Repano National Park. “That is why the gringos need people to be indoctrinated, to be part of a cult, to believe in God – or even to believe that capital is God, that it is on its way and that it will save the people.”
This is the scenario in which national and international media have entered communities devastated by the twin earthquakes in search of discontent to paint a severely biased picture of the reality on the ground, casting a blind eye toward survivors like Domingo, Justo, and Juan. “This is important,” Justo told me: “you’re here from the U.S., where they sell the image that Venezuela is bad, it’s a disaster, that all you’ll see is the ruptured streets [from the earthquakes]. But you have to come to Venezuela and see if that’s true. What they do is sell problems, not solutions. So those of us who are here – and my home was declared red – I’m not here just to be here. This is my home. I’m looking for solutions.”
Building the Future
Without dignity at its core, a meal may look like a can of tuna and saltine crackers offered with pity or condescension, and shelter like plastic stretched over dirt and rubble, but for people like Carlos, Justo, Domingo, Francisco, and Juan, who have set out amid the rubble to rebuild their communities with culture, care, and collective life woven into each aspect of daily life, this is far from enough.
On a Sunday in late August, the temporary shelter at the Caribbean Maritime University looked more like a fairground than a refugee camp. A brigade from the state of Táchira led by Grecia Colmenares, a deputy to and the second vice president of the National Assembly, had arrived to coordinate the week’s cultural activities as part of an ongoing rotation, converting the open-air canteen into a dancefloor surrounded by booths serving ice cream, Andean soup, and the best sweets and pastelitos of their region. Members of the Guardia del Pueblo (People’s Guards), a sector of Venezuela’s armed forces, served as wheelchair attendants and peacekeepers, breaking up the occasional fight between children over who received which doll, or whether or not a goal during a soccer match had been fairly called. In the tent in which the Gran Cacique Mare Commune’s self-governance room is currently operating at the Mar Abajo Baseball Field temporary shelter, Domingo and Justo rebuild not only their community but their dreams for the future and how to lift up the communities around them. Wendy, a protegida and young mother at the Narciso Gonell shelter, enjoyed a child-free moment during breakfast as she watches her neighbors take turns fawning over her eleven-month-old daughter and three-year-old son. At the Luis Hurtado Higuera shelter in El Junquito, a communal policewoman danced with a child to the sounds of an Afro-Caribbean percussion group from the Ruta de la Esperanza (Route of Hope).
After the concert at the Luis Hurtado Higuera shelter came to a close, two teenage boys swept the common area. I asked why they had volunteered to clean up. One of them snickered, his eyes reflecting the universal teenage “duh…” that transcends any spoken language. Because it’s dirty, he said. I pressed further. Because that’s what we do. That’s what it is to be Venezuelan, his friend chimed in. To take care of each other. To build hope amid the rubble. To build the world we deserve to live in and the new human beings we must learn to become.