The level of U.S. involvement in Venezuela since American forces captured its former president this year is remarkable. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has become a “de facto viceroy,” my colleagues report in a revealing story published this weekend. Through a steady stream of WhatsApp messages with its new president, Rubio controls Venezuela’s export revenues and decides how that money should be spent, who should be allowed to do business in the country and who should hold important offices.

That kind of authority over a foreign government is, let’s say, unusual. But it also comes with big risks for the United States — risks that have only grown after a pair of devastating earthquakes last month. That’s because the U.S. is entangling itself with a deeply unloved, unelected government that is rapidly losing its already limited credibility over a disaster response widely criticized as incompetent. Today I write about the explosive post-quake politics in Venezuela.

Rage vs. repression

When the earthquakes came, much of the social housing project known as OPPE 26 — a densely populated set of concrete high-rises in the Venezuelan state of La Guaira — collapsed completely.

Drone videos reveal the scale of the destruction. The piles of dust and rubble the quakes left behind no longer resemble buildings at all.

The towers of OPPE 26 are far from the only buildings to have collapsed during Venezuela’s massive back-to-back earthquakes last month. But their utter destruction has taken on an outsize symbolic value.