Blog de Valentina Oropeza

The ranchos in the mountains were left standing. The city’s buildings collapsed.

When Susana Raffalli Arismendi visited La Guaira for the first time after the earthquakes, she was surprised to discover that the most vulnerable areas had been the least affected.

With 22 years in humanitarian assistance, and experience in at least seven large-scale emergencies, Raffalli explains that in most earthquakes structural damage coincides with social vulnerability: those most affected are usually the poorest.

But in La Guaira it did not happen that way. While the ranches were built by their owners on rocky soil, the buildings on the coast had been erected on sandy soil.

Raffalli also hadn’t seen survivors of devastation of this scale remove rubble with their bare hands to rescue their relatives and neighbors.

He still remembers a lady from Los Corales who was able to name each of the neighbors who had been left under the rubble: the man of such and such an apartment, the lady of such and such a floor.

That woman dedicated herself to looking for people she didn’t even know.

“They were not figures. They were not anonymous victims. They were neighbors,” Rafalli says.

This solidarity, in his opinion, offers two interpretations: on the one hand, it reveals a society that retains an enormous capacity for organization. And on the other, it shows that many people no longer expect anything from the State.

His conclusion is that disaster is not just a natural event: an emergency becomes a disaster when the response is inadequate.

That phrase sums up what I have documented in Venezuela over and over again, for a decade covering the humanitarian emergency.