{"id":990,"date":"2026-07-01T12:43:58","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T12:43:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=990"},"modified":"2026-07-01T12:43:58","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T12:43:58","slug":"the-vultures-arrived-before-the-rescue-teams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=990","title":{"rendered":"The Vultures Arrived Before the Rescue Teams"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Big earthquakes flatten buildings into rubble the same way everywhere. Last Wednesday, when back-to-back quakes of magnitudes 7.5 and 7.2 rocked a large part of my native Venezuela, I found some dark consolation in the thought that such tragedies are impartial to place. The tectonic plates deep below had exerted their formidable powers because this is what they sometimes do. The suffering would be acute, but its precedents were universal and as old as the Earth.<\/p>\n

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But Venezuela\u2019s man-made disasters didn\u2019t take long to exacerbate the natural one. For 28 years and counting, Venezuela\u2019s rulers have stolen or squandered much of the oil revenue of the most oil-rich country in the world. Oligarchs pocketed the petrodollars of the late-aughts oil boom and left the nation somehow poorer and more indebted. In the hours just before the earthquakes struck, the regime released a total figure for the amount that it owed its creditors: $240 billion. The humanitarian consequences of this wastefulness were well documented before last Wednesday. Now they have acquired a fresh urgency.<\/p>\n

In the crucial first 24 hours following the quakes, the government response was practically nonexistent. In an upscale neighborhood in Caracas, ill-equipped police officers illuminated the rubble with cellphone flashlights, and volunteers used their bare hands to clear debris. Elsewhere, people had to make do with even less. In La Guaira, a hard-hit coastal city near Caracas, some survivors waited days for help sifting through the wreckage to find out whether their family members were alive or dead. Some said they could hear the screams of their loved ones but were unable to reach them without heavy machinery, which did not come in time. An unusual number of vultures have been seen flying over what\u2019s left of La Guaira in recent days. The birds appear to have arrived in some disaster zones before the rescue teams.<\/p>\n

The lack of preparation is unforgivable. Worse, the regime led by Delcy Rodr\u00edguez\u2014under the heavy-handed management of the Trump administration\u2014has taken active steps to make matters worse. The government deployed the military to the disaster areas not to help but to diffuse any expression of public discontent. \u201cHere there are more rifles than shovels,\u201d a volunteer reportedly shouted in despair. Civil-society groups pleaded for the government to unblock access to social media and censored news outlets, even if only temporarily, so that people could get information. Instead, Rodr\u00edguez announced that local and international journalists would be subjected to further restrictions.<\/p>\n

International assistance has met with obstacles. On Friday, Caracas refused to authorize a rescue mission from the Dominican Republic. Spain and France, too, wanted to send first responders, but the Venezuelan government wouldn\u2019t grant them visas. Eventually the authorities did allow brigades from the United States, Chile, El Salvador, and many other countries to enter, but these forces have received little support from the Venezuelan government, which now requires official authorization from anyone entering La Guaira.<\/p>\n

On Sunday, as the possibility of finding people still alive under the rubble grew slimmer by the hour, Rodr\u00edguez decided to interrupt the rescuers\u2019 work for a meet and greet: \u201cWe wanted to set you all aside from your tasks, which we know are so vital, just so that we could thank you on behalf of the Venezuelan people,\u201d she said. \u201cThese hours are critical for saving lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Nearly 44,000 of the people who have been reported missing on an online platform are still unaccounted for. The morgue that serves La Guaira is makeshift\u2014a white tent on a dock lined with body bags and coffins. Some bodies have been covered in lime to slow down the rate of decay. The death toll has surpassed 1,700 and is still rising. And survivors are left with little recourse. The day after the earthquakes, some volunteers stumbled upon a 7-year-old boy named Mateo, shirtless and covered in debris, sitting by himself on a sidewalk in La Guaira. \u201cThe only one who survived the collapse was me,\u201d Mateo calmly explained in a video shot by volunteers. \u201cMy mother stopped breathing at 7:30 in the morning.\u201d Not far from where he sat, a woman showed reporters that she had hidden the bodies of her aunt and uncle behind some mattresses. She had been waiting for hours for the authorities to come and do something about them.<\/p>\n

For many of us, this is a tragedy unfolding at a distance that carries its own kind of pain. In the past decade, one in four Venezuelans has left the country; nearly every family has been separated. And so millions of us around the world have been trying to reach family members, with no way of knowing whether certain calls go unanswered because of electrical outages, which are common even in ordinary times, or the unthinkable.<\/p>\n

Stephanie Fajardo, a Spanish teacher in Boston, told me she knew that her father was trapped in a collapsed apartment building in La Guaira, and she knew that he was alive, because people had heard him screaming the morning after the quakes. Neighbors managed to rescue his wife, but not him, and because the roads around his building were blocked, no rescue team was forthcoming. Stephanie made a guide on Instagram to assist anyone who might help her father. She posted his Google Maps coordinates and a picture annotated with a circle around the exact hole of rubble where her father\u2019s screams were last heard. She posted insistently and even offered a reward. But by the time her father was found, 72 hours after the quakes, he was dead.<\/p>\n

I have been lucky. My family members have lost property, but not lives. But like many other Venezuelans, I am riveted by the pictures of endless rubble, of buildings whose facades have collapsed, displaying the rooms inside like dioramas of life before disaster.<\/p>\n

Every time there is an aftershock\u2014and there have been many\u2014my mother calls me. They were scary at first, but now they seem more like reminders of the instability deep below, and of what it means to live under a regime that values its own permanence over the permanence of anything else.<\/p>\n

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Venezuela\u2019s government has managed to make a natural disaster even worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":989,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-global"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Vultures Arrived Before the Rescue Teams - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=990\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Vultures Arrived Before the Rescue Teams - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Venezuela\u2019s government has managed to make a natural disaster even worse.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=990\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-01T12:43:58+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=990#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=990\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"The Vultures Arrived Before the Rescue Teams\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-01T12:43:58+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=990\"},\"wordCount\":1063,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=990#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/d9ad93f28ec79b480abf8b728049eeeb.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Global\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=990#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=990\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=990\",\"name\":\"The Vultures Arrived Before the Rescue Teams - 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