LA GUAIRA, Venezuela — As postquake efforts in Venezuela start shifting from rescue to recovery, a crack has opened in Venezuelan society, and people are speaking out against their repressive government with a force and openness that has not been seen in years.
Across La Guaira, the northern state hardest hit by the twin quakes, grieving citizens have shouted down police officers and national guard members, accusing them of standing by as civilians and international aid workers dig for the living, and now, the dead.
In interviews, Venezuelans are openly criticizing the country’s ruling party and its leader, Delcy Rodríguez, something that would have been unthinkable just a year ago.
They are also turning their anger toward the Trump administration, which has spent the last few months facilitating economic deals between U.S. companies and Venezuela, and has stood by the government’s management of the disaster.
Inside Venezuela, fears of imprisonment, torture, and forced exile, once powerful incentives for silence, are being pushed aside as feelings of frustration and impotence grow.
“Why would I be afraid?” said José Silva, 47, who on Friday was resting on a sidewalk not far from a giant public housing complex now turned to rubble. Some 700 families had lived inside.
Silva’s clothes were drenched with sweat; it was evening, only partway through his 10th day pulling survivors and bodies from under slabs of concrete. He lashed out at the government: the police were rescuing only their own, he said, and the government had sent only “second rate” tools.
“Why would I be afraid,” to speak out, he said, “if I was born to die?”
This anger runs parallel to growing political tension over the leadership of Rodríguez. When U.S. forces captured her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, in January and greenlit her ascension from vice president to president, the Trump administration characterized Rodríguez as a force of stability.
Before the quake, President Donald Trump said that she was doing a “very good job” running the country.
But criticism of her government’s response to the disaster, particularly in the critical first 72 hours when victims are most likely to be rescued alive, and the growing fury in the streets, has raised questions about whether she can cement that stability.
The public outrage could also complicate the Trump administration’s strategy of supporting Rodríguez so the United States can benefit from Venezuela’s resources.
Trump’s envoy to Venezuela, John Barrett, has supported Rodríguez, saying in a television interview after the quakes that Washington had “a great deal of confidence” in the Venezuelan authorities.
But in recent days a chorus of hard-line congressional Republicans have doubled down on criticism of her management, calling for political change as soon as possible.
“They’re failing at their job right now,” Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R., Fla.) said in an interview with CNN, calling Rodríguez an “interim dictator.”
Venezuelans have gathered outside the U.S. Embassy, pleading with Barrett to do more to help victims. One man, yelling into news media microphones outside the embassy recently, harangued Barrett for sitting with government officials the United States had once deemed criminals and terrorists, while victims suffered “just two blocks away.”
“The grievance is indeed directed at John Barrett,” he shouted. “Why has he not sat with Venezuelan civil society — the honest ones, the ones who haven’t stolen anything?”
Maria Corina Machado, the country’s popular opposition leader, has been trying to get back into the country, but she does not have a passport, or permission from Rodríguez or the United States, to enter Venezuela.
At a news briefing on Thursday, Rodríguez defended her government’s response to the disaster, saying she had immediately dispatched 4,000 government workers to respond to the quakes, a number that had grown to 19,000.
“What happened in Venezuela on June 24 was a natural tragedy of a scale we never imagined,” she said.
In response to accusations of a poor state response, Rodríguez asserted repeatedly that “media laboratories” were inventing a narrative of chaos.
As evidence of the government’s mobilization, official social media accounts have heavily publicized a handful of state-supported rescues, including one in which dozens of well-equipped emergency workers from Chile rescued a man who had survived a week in the rubble. Rodríguez visited the man at the hospital.
But these videos contrast sharply with the reality in La Guaira, where civilians in sneakers and T-shirts are doing a vast amount of the rescue and recovery work, using shovels and pickaxes and their bare hands to pull friends, neighbors, children, spouses, siblings, and parents from the rubble. Some lack masks to protect themselves from the dust and stench of decomposing bodies.
Rodríguez was widely criticized in Venezuela as out of touch after she was photographed wearing a luxury ski jacket, a logo of the Italian brand Moncler on her arm, to visit quake victims.
“It’s a lie that the government is helping,” Silva said.
Soon after he spoke, darkness fell. Not far way, a group of men had just discovered five bodies in a hole they had dug in the side of the mountain of broken concrete.
The men wrapped the bodies in sheets and then laid them gently on the ground. Survivors looking for relatives crowded around, pulling back the sheets to try to identify the deceased. One was the body of a little girl. The others were unrecognizable.
Thousands of people are now homeless, and the death toll, officially over 3,500, is likely to be far greater. In the coming weeks, the government will be under intense pressure to address an increasingly complex humanitarian crisis.
Outside of another collapsed public housing building, Kimberling León, 39, a resident of the complex, described the government response in the hours and days after the quakes hit.
She was searching for her sons, ages 9 and 13, who she believed were trapped in the rubble.
“The police came by, normal, filming, they didn’t help us,” she said, her voice flat, like a person still in shock.
“We said to them: ‘help us, help us,’ they didn’t come to our aid. We started digging with our hands, but the smoke was too much, the flames rose high, the gas tanks had exploded.”
The second or third day, a shovel and pickax arrived, she said.
“We started digging, digging, digging. We called for machines to help, but they just passed us by, headed to the private buildings” where people could pay, she said.
Silence has been one of the most valuable commodities in La Guaira, as rescuers try to make out the taps and calls of any living that might still be buried in the rubble.
Often, rescuers shoot a fist in the air and call for quiet, instructing drivers to cut motors and people to stop walking.
On a recent day, profanities rained down on the interior ministry workers who rolled past a silent zone with sirens blaring. Civilians banged on the car in anger.
While the quakes have opened space for people to vent years of pent up fury, this public outcry could also spur a crackdown, leading to questions about how the United States would respond to any repression.
The last major social outburst was in 2024, after the ruling party stole a presidential election.
Venezuelan officials halted protests in a matter of days by sending the military into the streets, killing protesters and locking up civilians accused of minor expressions of dissent.
Last week, a volunteer rescuer named Wilmer Cruz who had been filmed speaking out about the government response disappeared, according to human rights groups.
When activists publicly accused the government of retaliating against Cruz, the authorities released him from prison.
Oscar Murillo, who leads Provea, a human rights group, said the arrest highlighted for him that the quakes have not changed the “authoritarian model” in Venezuela.
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
