Venezuela: Post quake, time for President Trump to shuck Delcy Rodriguez

Big earthquakes in capitals are normally ‘overthrow’ time for bad governments in Latin America.

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We saw it in Peru, where the military junta, led by leftist tinpot dictator Juan Velasco Alvarado, was thrown out in a 1975 coup d’etat in the wake of its bad response to the huge 1970 Ancash earthquake, which killed 70,000 in a landslide, and the 1974 8.1 quake that severely damaged the capital of Lima, leaving 2,000 dead. 

We saw it in Nicaragua, with the 1978 overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship by the Marxist Sandinistas, coming in the wake of the 1972 earthquake, which left Managua in rubble — and still in rubble, six years later. 

We saw it in Mexico, when the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which had ruled Mexico as ‘the perfect dictatorship’ for 71 years, was thrown out of power in the 2000 election at least in part because of its slow response to the 1986 Mexico City earthquake. In the run-up elections leading to that decisive one, the opposition came very close to winning, and had probably been defrauded.

And though we didn’t see it, it also happened in Venezuela: This 2019 account published in the Caracas Chronicles is quite a wild ride, describing how the first republic, associated with independence heroes Francisco Miranda and Simon Bolivar, collapsed in the wake of three simultaneous earthquakes (in the same spots as today) which left Caracas in ruins.

Lesson: When the earthquake comes, the state response better be a good one, a Chilean-level good one, or out the shambling government goes.

Now it’s these Venezuelan quakes, two of them, infinitely more destructive and horrible than the others, that confronts the rump Chavista regime and its odd alliance with President Trump, who seems to be keeping them there as a puppet state until elections are held.

They regime, which was installed through naked election fraud in 2024, had zero legitimacy before the quake, and with Caracas and the entire populated coast on its knees in quake devastation, their legitimacy is less than zero. 

Yet still, they find ways to make matters worse. Some examples:

First, as elite rescue teams from the U.S. El Salvador, France, Colombia, Mexico, Israel and many other countries swooped down to help (and humble Colombian citizens didn’t even wait around for their government, they just loaded up the aid and headed for the border), while Elon Musk swiftly made Starlink free for communications there, the Venezuelan military was … nowhere to be found. 

Desperate ctizens were digging people out of the rubble with their hands.

Like Karen Bass, the Venezuelan army had other things to do during the critical rescue and recovery effort with thousands of people trapped in collapsed buildings:

Such a manly military:

Their priority seems to be stealing incoming aid shipments for themselves:

They’re also failing to prevent looting, not just of food stores, but high-value goods prized by thieves. The failure to preserve public order in a crisis is always a big one:

Even the cops are reportedly looting, according to this video:

They’re shutting down aid distribution centers set up by the opposition:

… and stopping first responders based on their political litmust test, according this report:

They’re reportedly lying about the body counts, currently at more than 500, and probably more than that — 68,000 people are reported missing, and yes, some will be found alive, but not everyone is going to survive a skyscraper collapse, and with a hundreds of skyscrapers down, the possibilities are horrible.

This link isn’t shareable owing to its graphic photos of bloodied dead bodies laid out in the streets after the quake, but the claim of undercounting the dead is likely true, given that they have lied about crime-victim figures in the past.

Mismanaged government, mismanaged crisis, and the potential for flat out revolt seems very high at this point, the government of Delcy Rodriguez making the right-sounding statements about a crisis, but going business as usual in prioritizing the suppression of dissent, the military gone AWOL during search and rescue, (probably to preserve its capacity to stomp out revolts), the bureaucratic box ticking for aid, the failure to preserve public order, and the usual lying about body counts. This on top of the deteriorated housing stock, the failure to enforce codes, and the failure to respect property rights which set the stage for the catastrophe.

The only thing this nasty government cares about at a time like this is its own preservation. And horrifically, the U.S. is supposedly aligned with them, a government that has absolutely nothing good about it, and which is doing little but leaving its people to die. 

Does the U.S. really want to be associated with this? Can some political muscle be applied to force them to play ball and clean up their act? The situation seems to cry out for a MacArthur in Japan model, an American to give orders and ensure that public order is restored, and property rights are paramount, as MacArthur effectively did in post-war Japan. 

Someone like Florida’s Gov. Rick DeSantis might be the man to do it, a former military man with extensive experience in swiftly cleaning up after the most heinous hurricane disasters. He’d know what to do.

Yes, it sounds farfetched, and details may vary; if there is someone else just as good, well, good, use him.

But the point is, the U.S. is being too passive here and the Chavistas are creating conditions for their own inevitable demise and we shouldn’t be part of it. Earthquakes have ways of ousting bad governments in this region and Venezuela is no exception.

It’s time for President Trump to force decency onto the Chavista regime, or whip out the CIA and ask them to take care of business. Democracy has been coming a long time for Venezuela and now the hour for it is close. The U.S. should dump this dictatorship swiftly and not have the massive failure of the Venezuelan regime anywhere near its circle of alliances.

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Image: Screenshot from X video