Journalist William Neuman explores the aftermath of the devastating double earthquake that rocked northern Venezuela on June 24, 2026. He paints a picture of the desperate residents of La Guaira, a coastal area north of Caracas, the capital, where thousands of people died and dozens or perhaps hundreds of buildings collapsed.
In the absence of a vigorous response by Venezuela's hollowed out government, many people were forced to dig by hand through mountains of rubble, trying to reach family members trapped below, hoping to find them alive but most often retrieving their corpses.
Neuman uses his extensive experience reporting on Venezuela to show how two La Guaira tragedies—the catastrophic landslides in December 1999, which killed thousands during Hugo Chávez’s first year in office, and this month’s earthquakes—occupying the same geography and spanning a political epoch, provide painful bookmarks to the quarter-century of Chavismo.
Along the way, he addresses two key questions: How will the quakes affect the country’s unusual tutelary relationship with the Trump administration, following the U.S. intervention earlier in the year? And what will it mean for the country’s hoped-for return to democracy?
