CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Against Amnesia: The Venezuelan Earthquake, the Historical Moment and the Continental Question

Photograph Source: U.S. Marines 24MEU by Lance Cpl. Allison White – Public Domain

Earthquakes interrupt everyday life, but not history. Nor do they suspend politics. If anything, they compress history into a few dramatic days, revealing social relations, political projects, and geopolitical forces that ordinarily remain beneath the surface. The Venezuelan earthquake is no exception.

As we argued in a recent article, the quake’s impact spread along material and social fractures that were already carved deep by a decade of crippling sanctions and other imperialist aggressions. In its wake came inevitable struggles over sovereignty and meaning. Although centered in Venezuela, these struggles belong to a broader historical picture: the increasingly aggressive attempt to reassert U.S. domination over Latin America.

The ground had hardly stopped shaking before Washington began advancing its agenda. A naive or hopeful observer might have expected the U.S.-led campaign against the Venezuelan government to ease at this point. After all, Caracas had made a series of concessions to the U.S. under extraordinary military and economic pressure in the post–January 3 period. Instead, the opposite happened.

Within hours of the earthquake, an intense information war got going. Even as thousands of firefighters, civil protection personnel, members of the Venezuelan armed forces, health workers, communal organizations, and volunteers were being deployed to the hardest-hit areas, most of the international media moved in lockstep to deny it. Against all evidence, they insisted that the Venezuelan government was absent—that there was no state response, no civil defense, no organized rescue effort.

Of course, no country is ever fully prepared for a disaster of this magnitude, much less one that has endured years of imperialist economic war. Yet the actual response, impressive in both scale and commitment, was systematically erased from public view. Later, corporate media portrayed every government measure—from coordinating rescue operations and organizing shelters to regulating the flow of humanitarian aid—as evidence of “authoritarianism.”

To be clear, these narratives did not emerge only from the pro-imperialist corporate press. They also spread through social media and ostensibly “independent” voices. Yet the remarkable uniformity of these messages points to their being part of an organized campaign. That is the only way to account for their employing the same framing devices, containing the same omissions, and arriving at the same conclusions.

Moreover, the corporate media lost no time in amplifying the most aggressive social media posts as part of its effort to delegitimize the Venezuelan government and sow political discontent amid legitimate grief and mourning, thereby reinforcing the notion that only........

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