For decades after the 1967 Caracas earthquake, seismologists warned Venezuelans that a major earthquake was coming. And we had been waiting for the big one. On Jun. 24, the prediction of horror came true. Twice. Two level-seven magnitude earthquakes struck northern Venezuela, the most densely populated region of the country, in less than a minute.

That would test any country. It is harder for Venezuela in 2026: a country where half the people live in extreme poverty, the economy has been reduced to a fraction of what it once was, a quarter of its population was lost to mass migration in less than a decade, and the healthcare system is in ruins.

Living through the earthquakes felt like battling cancer and being struck by two cars in the same breath. At least 5,000 people perished, most of them in La Guaira state, a strip of cities and slums crammed between the coastal cordillera and the Caribbean Sea, half an hour from Caracas.

Amid the staggering destruction, the question of how many people are missing looms over the country. How many remain buried beneath the rubble? How many were lost in the chaos—a strong likelihood with children and elderly patients? In the absence of any official accounting, several online platforms solicited reports of missing relatives from survivors. Estimates range from 10,000 to around 30,000 missing persons.

The Venezuelan government has neither the capacity nor the will to produce an accurate death toll. The online public sphere was inundated with drone footage, satellite imagery, news coverage, and NASA maps laying bare the scale of the devastation.

Venezuela has run aground under a Chavista regime since 1999, when Hugo Chavez rose to power and created a regime combining left-wing populism, authoritarianism, petro-state largesse, and anti-Americanism. After Chavez died in 2013, Nicolas Maduro took over and hollowed out the country till his removal in January. The Trump Administration simply recycled the Chavista regime, with Delcy Rodriguez, a stalwart of the old establishment, as an interim president who offered compliance and national resources to Washington.

Throughout the Maduro years, the Chavista regime refused to publish crime and inflation rates. Few expect the Rodriguez government to offer a truthful accounting of the tragedy, one that the U.S.........

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