Venezuela Under the Rubble

On June 24 two powerful earthquakes rocked Venezuela within seconds of each other. While approximately 120 people died in the capital, Caracas, the worst damage occurred just north. In the state of La Guaira, along a strip of popular Caribbean beaches, one apartment tower after another collapsed. Thousands of people died.I’ve made the thirty-minute drive from Caracas to La Guaira many times with friends for trips to the beach. But what I saw when I got there eight days after the earthquakes recalled photos of bombed-out cities. Whole stretches of buildings—both luxury condominiums and government-built apartment blocks—had been flattened, reduced to shards.Here a building fell into a tangle of twisted steel and buckled concrete, the thick floor slabs smashed tightly together. Nearby another one remained precariously standing, but with an outer wall stripped away, exposing a closet of clothes still on their hangers, a children’s bunk bed, a family room painted orange, with the English word HOME stenciled on the wall, the “O” in the shape of a house. I walked up a hill of ruins and emerged, to my surprise, at the edge of an empty swimming pool, an unblinking blue eye staring at the sk...