“Random phenomena are natural, disasters are not…That early morning, rescue groups did not operate by crossing over information or coordinating actions in a systematic manner. During the emergency, Defensa Civil and rescue groups worked without rest, without means, and without sufficient personnel to adequately respond to the catastrophic circumstances that were affecting thousands…And so, the sentiment of the people who lost their homes, those directly affected, and even of the rescuers, is that they faced the situation on their own”.

These quotes are 16 years old. They come from pages 33, 44 and 53 of Poder y Catástrofe (2010), by Paula Vásquez Lezama (1969-2021), recognized as a rigorous work on the 1999 Tragedia de Vargas. Her articles in English on the topic were important contributions to social and political anthropology. 

As she details, “the steep skirts of the Cordillera de la Costa, on both its north-coastal side and its southern Caracas-facing one, have a natural predisposition to landslides. Said fragility has resulted aggravated by arbitrary and accelerated intervention on the relief to urbanize it in the last thirty years.” As we are beginning to understand why the 2026 earthquakes were so devastating, it is important to remember that the mismanagement of urban development on the Cordillera de la Costa did not begin with Chavez. Chavismo, however, accelerated the ruin of the institutions and thus exponentially increased the vulnerability of already vulnerable populations. “I was able to establish that rescuers who participated in the operations of La Tragedia evoked the problems in the coordination of efforts as causing situations equally as damaging and sometimes worse for the survivors than the catastrophe at the hands of nature. Experts in rescue affirmed to me with emphasis that the management of the (Vargas) disaster was a disaster”.

Every single page of my mother’s book, published in 2010, feels like either a description of the last hours in Vargas, or a chilling explanation for the massive scale of destruction caused by the 2026 earthquake. Her work has become part of the Venezuelan historical cycle. It used to be a study of the crystallization of a new political regime, and it is now also the proof that the mismanagement of disasters as a result of political decisions is a characterizing and foundational feature of the Venezuelan regime. 

She knew this, however. She dedicated her work after La Tragedia to what she would never get to name and publicly claim as “the ruins”. She understood that Chavismo ruined bodies, institutions, and infrastructures. Her work on Franklin Brito, another paradigmatic example of its management of bodies, on CLAP boxes, on the Amuay refinery explosion, all pointed towards this idea of ruins.

The 2026 earthquake seems to have made ruins of an already ruined country. And while the time right now is of enhanced emotionality, our own personal pain emphasized by our constant witnessing of the victims through social media, it is important to remember Poder y Catastrofe. In the aftermath of the disaster, the reappropriation of suffering for political purposes was contextually situated in the making of new political relational dynamics. At the time, Vásquez Lezama details the lack of adequate disaster management, in different ways than today, but with comparable consequences. 

She describes the scenes being broadcast on live TV of people being saved, of journalists crying with the people they were interviewing, with a saturation of the mediatic space of images that kept fueling high emotionality, during a time where paradoxically we have to remain as clear-headed as possible. During her fieldwork between 2000 and 2004, she recounts a rescuer telling her: “To be able to hear the names of all the people rescued you had to have various televisions turned on at the same time in different rooms! None of the lists that were being communicated matched” (page 51). Today, entire families are scrolling and alternating between Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and several citizen-organized websites aimed at finding people, trying to find their loved ones. 

In her book, my mother wrote that “children that had been identified by witnesses never reappeared, not in registries, not in the census of the institutions that took care of them.” No doubt that countless comparative works will come from this, the dramatic coincidences are too cruel not too. The same vulnerable population that lived through Vargas ‘99, many of which ended up going back to what was left of Vargas. 

The same vulnerable populations, whose suffering was co-opted by Chavismo in the cementing of its political theology, are today abandoned by the same state that made them dependent on it.

The most perverse aspect of it all is perhaps the continuity. Everything has changed, Venezuela is under its third President who identifies as Chavista, the oil industry has collapsed, mass exodus has depleted the country demographically, and years of economic collapse has depleted it of resources. But nothing has changed, the devastation remains.

It would, however, be inaccurate to pretend total continuity. My mother’s fieldwork showed that La Tragedia and the lack of appropriate institutional infrastructure created a breach for the hyper-militarization of the state, which Hugo Chávez exploited by protagonising the rescue efforts.

Today, the Venezuelan military that the late president imposed as “the savior” is no more. The 3rd of January had marked a rupture in the perception of the FANB, and their absent involvement in the search and rescue efforts of the last days marked another stage in their shifting image. It is not rare to hear one of a few comments asking for the US Navy to come and “put some order”, the same way Vásquez Lezama related some of the Vargas population thinking of the military and subsequent violence as necessary in the management of the disaster zone. 

Perhaps what Poder y Catástrofe can bring us today is the clarity that we are at a moment of reconfiguration. There is resentment built from years of neglect from institutional powers, which in recent days has crystallized in a resentment towards the Venezuelan army in particular. There is a vacuum in charismatic leadership, and this is no longer the golden age of Chavismo. 

We cannot underestimate the dimensions of the breach that has opened as a result of this. Parts of the population now have nothing else to lose; the State does not have any money to promise them anything, and the internal unity in 1999, due to the newness of Chavismo, is no more. 

The context has changed, but Paula Vásquez Lezama’s grasp on the relational dynamics in the context of post-disaster violence and governance remains intact.