Searching for Survivors After Venezuela’s Historic Earthquakes

These buildings are among the world’s foremost landmarks of mid-century modernism, though the country’s more recent socioeconomic isolation has meant that they went largely unnoticed outside Venezuela. As I leaned out of the van, surveying the damage in La Guaira, where hundreds of buildings had been crushed by their own weight, collapsing inward toward their foundations, I thought about how Le Corbusier, perhaps the greatest practitioner of architectural modernism, spoke of houses as “machines for living in.” In La Guaira, it was difficult not to think about the inverse formulation; by dint of disaster and greed, the homes constructed here had become machines for dying in. When we reached the city of Catia La Mar, where, according to some estimates, more than thirty per cent of buildings have been damaged, I began to notice the stench of decomposing bodies.

In Caracas, or Maracaibo, or La Guaira, there is a sense that Venezuela has been built, in the words of the playwright José Ignacio Cabrujas, as “an eternal return to the future.” Marcos Pérez Jiménez, the autocrat who ruled the country in the mid-twentieth century, commissioned modern architectural projects to project an image of the country as, if not progressive, at the very least progressing. But these efforts came to seem like a cover for the harsh realities of poverty and inequality. When Hugo Chávez, a charismatic and passionate leader, managed to inspire the public to vote for a socialist revolution, he promised to finally redirect Venezuela’s oil wealth to its poorest citizens. Yet the country’s dysfunctions continued in a different form. The same boom-and-bust dependency on the oil industry, whose profits were now funnelled through the regime and its allies, kept the country lurching from one crisis to the next. The government continued to insist that Venezuela was headed for a great future that never quite arrived.

The art and architecture that the Chavismo regime commissioned differed stylistically from what Jiménez had built, but the fundamental message remained the same. Venezuela’s cities are covered in murals—typically portraits of government officials next to hopeful slogans—that urge citizens, in one way or another, to ignore the harsh past and present, and to keep believing in the future. People are reluctant to paint over them, not wanting to interfere with the state’s imagery. Now, in La Guaira, modern skyscrapers and state propaganda are part of the rubble, indistinguishable from each other. I saw a building with only one fragment of wall left standing; some civilian graffiti on it read “SALARIO SUFICIENTE PARA VIVIR DIGNAMENTE”: “a salary sufficient for living with dignity.”

There is an enduring faith in the idea of a Venezuela whose prosperity matches its beauty. Long before the earthquakes, derelict towns—empty swimming pools, abandoned hotels—became ubiquitous on the coast. The remnants of a once extensive tourism industry, they came to serve as a symbol, to Venezuelans, of the country’s immense failures and immense potential. But the destruction in La Guaira is something else entirely. The region’s extensive infrastructure is, in almost all cases, completely beyond saving; everything will have to be rebuilt. I met a resident who had lived in the area all her life. “I won’t go back,” she told me. “It is no longer a place for the living.”

As the rescue team drove past the remains of an enormous skyscraper, a foreign-aid worker with an ambiguous accent shouted to some civilian volunteers, “How many dead have you pulled out?” The building had been destroyed so completely that asking about survivors would have been naïve. Later in the day, I looked on as local construction workers used their cranes to sift through the rubble, picking it up and dropping it down slowly as they watched for falling bodies. Once the dead reached the surface, the men used blankets or sheets from the debris to cover them; they had already run out of body bags. They used doors from the wreckage to carry the bodies into the bed of a volunteer’s truck. The only hope, for this building, at least, was that the dead might be identified, so that families could begin the long process of grieving. But many of the corpses had been damaged beyond recognition.