‘God is punishing the politicians’: anger at earthquake response grows in Venezuela | Venezuela
Many people are growing angry at the Venezuelan government’s botched response to twin earthquakes that killed nearly 4,500 people; A grieving mother was caught on camera berating the son of former president Nicolás Maduro.
Maduro’s politician son faced a hostile reception while visiting a half-demolished social housing project named after his father’s late mentor, Hugo Chavez.
“I didn’t lose the kitchen! I lost my daughter!” The woman, Damely Yaneth Díaz, is seen yelling at congressman Nicolás Maduro Guerra. scenes It was picked up by Norwegian broadcaster TV2 last week.
“You should all be arrested,” said Díaz, a resident of Catia La Mar, one of the hardest-hit areas of the crisis on Venezuela’s northern coast. “This was carelessness and you must pay for it!”
Bystanders applauded the opposition and urged European journalists to continue filming the fight after authorities tried to interrupt their work.
Díaz’s comments, which went viral on social media, sparked widespread outrage over what many saw as the government’s bungled response to the June 24 earthquakes, which destroyed scores of buildings in the northern province of La Guaira and caused major damage in the capital Caracas. On Sunday the government raised the official death toll to 4,490, but that number is still expected to rise significantly as scores of bodies are recovered from the rubble of large buildings.
Venezuela’s US-backed acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, dismissed the criticism as the product of a treacherous media campaign concocted in propaganda “labs”. Last week, Rodríguez, a close ally of Maduro who came to power in January after US President Donald Trump ordered the leader’s kidnapping, insisted that his administration and armed forces were working “tirelessly” to help the victims. He attempted to partially justify the slow response by arguing that most of La Guaira’s top officials had been killed.
But Rodríguez has so far avoided high-profile interactions with the families of the dead and missing, who are on the front lines of the crisis in coastal towns such as Caraballeda and Catia La Mar. On Friday, he visited a military base in the region to address some of the thousands of soldiers he said were deployed, but did not mingle with the public. In his televised speech, Rodriguez told soldiers that “wretched” people who criticized the government and armed forces would be “buried,” comments that further angered families who had yet to retrieve the bodies of their loved ones.
Amidst the rubble of La Guaira’s collapsed buildings, in the critical hours and days after the earthquakes, there is outrage as victims feel they have to fend for themselves by pulling trapped relatives from the rubble with basic tools and bare hands.
Maduro’s 36-year-old son, whose father is being held in a New York prison on drug trafficking charges, tried to calm the grieving mother after she challenged him about his child’s death. Asked whether he understood the woman’s anger towards the government, the politician told the TV2 reporter: “Yes, I understand and I support it.” [her]. I can’t imagine the pain he feels.”
When asked about suspicions that the collapsed state public housing was shoddily constructed, Maduro Guerra pointed out that private housing estates also collapsed. When asked whether state projects were carried out properly, he answered: “I don’t know, I’m not an architect, I’m an economist.”
Following the military intervention to capture Maduro in January, public outrage and the possibility of social unrest threaten to derail Trump’s efforts to control oil-rich Venezuela. The disaster has strengthened long-standing opposition to the so-called socialist regime, which many blame for plunging Venezuela into years of economic and humanitarian crisis and dictatorship.
There is visible anger even in traditionally pro-government working-class areas where many people have died. But the White House has so far sided with Rodríguez’s unpopular administration, sending nearly 1,000 military personnel to support the emergency response. In the New York Times on Saturday requested US Secretary of State Marco Rubio now governed Venezuela from Washington and became the country’s “de facto assistant”.
Francisco González, a mover hired to salvage belongings from apartments in a dilapidated housing project called OPPE 25, was among those appalled by what he saw as his government’s bumbling response.
As he loaded furniture and clothes into his truck, González claimed that his actions contrasted with Hugo Chavez’s energetic response to the deadly landslide in 1999, the last major natural disaster to hit La Guaira. “[Back then] Chavez was the first person to get stuck here in his Wellington boots. “He had flaws, like every human being, but he loved people,” González, 60, said of Chavez, who appointed Maduro as his successor before his early death in 2013. “He is not like the scoundrels we have now.”
“I think God is punishing the politicians,” González added of the earthquakes, as volunteer rescuers continued to dig through nearby rubble.
