In Venezuela, a 'completely ineffective' government worsens earthquake disaster, experts say

Hospitals lacking medicines and equipment. Daily power outages. At least 8 million people in need of humanitarian support. These were the realities in Venezuela before it was hit by back-to-back earthquakes on June 24.

Venezuela has been in the midst of what experts describe as a complex humanitarian emergency for years.

Democratic backsliding, corruption, inflation and economic sanctions have left its people without access to basic services. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have fled the country in the past decade, one of the largest displacement crises in the world, according to the United Nations.

Venezuela has experienced "the sustained collapse of a society," said Phil Gunson, a senior analyst for International Crisis Group who has lived in Venezuela for decades. And now it's reeling from the devastation of one of its worst natural disasters.

In the week since consecutive 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes struck northern Venezuela, civilians have sometimes dug through rubble with their bare hands and begged for the government's help.

Watch the PBS News Hour segment in the player above.

The country's longstanding state of crisis has led to an insufficient and uncoordinated response that has "left citizens in a situation of deep vulnerability," said Laura Cristina Dib, director for Venezuela at the Washington Office on Latin America.

The Venezuelan government estimated Wednesday that 2,295 people have died in the earthquakes and another 11,000 are injured. However, that's believed to be a vast undercount. Gianluca Rampolla del Tindaro, the United Nations' humanitarian coordinator for Venezuela, said the organization was procuring 10,000 body bags. And U.N. emergency relief coordinator Tom Fletcher called an estimate of 50,000 missing people "terrifyingly plausible."

Here's what to know about the Venezuelan government's response to the twin quakes.

Where did Venezuela stand before the earthquakes?

Nearly six months before the earthquakes, the U.S. military captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, who had been in power since 2013. Delcy Rodríguez, the former vice president, has assumed control as interim leader, working with President Donald Trump's administration since.

WATCH: Trump says U.S. will 'run' Venezuela after capturing Maduro in surprise military strike

Maduro's capture offered a "glimmer of hope that Venezuela was going to recover its economy and democracy," David Smilde, a Tulane University professor who has studied Venezuela for decades, said in an email.

The U.S. lifted sanctions on Venezuela, allowing the government to work with U.S. companies to sell Venezuelan oil. But Rodríguez and the U.S. had announced no concrete plans for holding elections.

WATCH: News Wrap: U.S. eases sanctions on Venezuela's state-owned oil company

"Maduro's capture by U.S. forces in January might have decapitated the regime, but it did not change or reset the institutions the regime built," Orlando Pérez, a political science professor at the University of North Texas at Dallas, said in an email.

"Six months is not enough time to rebuild institutions that took two decades to hollow out," he said. "The earthquake struck a country that had no slack left to absorb a shock of this magnitude."

Watch the PBS News Hour segment in the player above.

Experts who spoke with PBS News said the earthquakes have laid bare the government's inability to respond to a crisis.

"It was wholly predictable that the government response would be entirely inadequate," Gunson said.

Pérez said Venezuela's government has been organized around "two priorities: regime survival and resource extraction."

"Hospitals were already running without basic medicine and equipment. The armed forces had been restructured to prevent coups, not to serve civilians," he said.

What has the response to the earthquakes looked like?

In the hours after the earthquakes struck, Rodríguez declared a state of emergency, appointing Juan Ernesto Sulbarán Quintero, the Venezuelan National Guard's commanding general, as the authority in charge of rescue efforts.

"They also communicated with the international community and accepted offers of aid regardless of political alliances," Pérez said. "However, the following days revealed just how little state capacity they have."

Twenty-seven countries, including the United States, and 40 search-and-rescue teams have been deployed, according to Rampolla del Tindaro.

Watch the PBS News Hour segment in the player above.

In the hours and days following the earthquakes, residents in some of the most affected areas told reporters on the ground that the government's presence had been limited, and that forces were more concerned with directing traffic. They begged on social media for emergency services and rescuers to help get their loved ones out of the rubble.

"The pattern in the first 48 hours was consistent across every region hit," Pérez said. "Firefighters without fuel. Civil defense workers using cellphone flashlights to search through rubble. Volunteers were digging with their bare hands because heavy equipment never arrived."

Residents flash mobile phone lights as they search for victims after earthquakes, in La Guaira, Venezuela, June 25, 2026. Photo by Maxwell Briceno/Reuters

Civilians and nonprofit organizations in Venezuela and abroad rallied together to ask for donations, arrange collection centers and create databases for people to report their missing loved ones.

"The scale of citizen mobilization tells its own story about what Venezuelans have learned to expect from their government, which is not much," Pérez said. "Volunteers organized search-and-rescue efforts before any state agency arrived."

Gunson said the state didn't have the capacity needed to respond to the earthquakes, noting first responders have been underfunded, understaffed and without necessary equipment for years.

"What we're seeing is the outcome of a lack of spending, lack of leadership, lack of planning," Gunson said. "A government that essentially doesn't appear to have given any thought to what would happen in the eventuality of an earthquake."

Aid donations are collected and organised for people in Venezuela affected by recent earthquakes, in Bogota, Colombia, June 26, 2026. Photo by Sergio Acero/Reuters

Beyond a lack of response from the government, experts also noted reports that the government may have been impeding aid.

A German emergency medical team said it was denied entry to Venezuela. A group of Colombian firefighters said they were delayed at a Venezuelan airport for hours without entry. A Chilean rescue group said authorities paused their work digging through rubble to ask for their documentation.

Rodríguez's government limited access to La Guaira, one of the hardest-hit states, asking people to register with authorities to gain entry, in an attempt to limit traffic congestion.

"This of course has caused a lot of anger among the people," Pérez said. "They see a government that has been quite effective at holding on to power and repressing the population when they protest or criticize. However, they are completely ineffective at actually protecting the people."

What comes next for Venezuela as it recovers from the earthquakes?

Efforts in Venezuela are still focused on rescue and recovery. But as the weeks and months proceed, the country will shift its attention toward rebuilding.

The United Nations estimates Venezuela faces $6.7 billion in physical damages.

"The needs for housing and healthcare will be massive in a country that already had an enormous population without adequate access to basic needs," Pérez said.

Natural disasters inevitably have political consequences, Gunson said. "There's always a political effect, but it's not necessarily straightforward."

The long-term impact of the earthquakes on Rodríguez's government remains to be seen.

View of coffins of victims of the June 24 twin earthquakes from the El Vigia fort in the heights above La Guaira, Venezuela, July 2, 2026. Pool photo by Miguel Medina/Reuters

"Reconstruction is where political legacies in disasters like this one are usually decided, more than in the emergency phase itself," Pérez said.

Experts pointed to historical examples, including a 1972 earthquake in Nicaragua, which eventually led to the end of dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle's rule.

"Those outcomes were not inevitable on day one," Pérez said. "They were produced by what happened in the months after the cameras left."

The experts emphasized that the United States now bears a responsibility toward Venezuela in its recovery efforts.

After Maduro's capture, Trump suggested the U.S. would "run" Venezuela and that the South American country would become the 51st state. The U.S. holds major influence over Rodríguez and can influence the country's political, economic and social future, Gunson said.

WATCH: Trump says U.S. will 'run' Venezuela after capturing Maduro in surprise military strike

Thus far, the U.S. has deployed nearly 2,000 military troops and pledged $300 million in aid.

"For Venezuela, the open question is whether Washington's attention and resources stay engaged through" the rebuilding phase, Pérez said. "Particularly with USAID gone, and the main instrument of sustained U.S. assistance now running through military logistics rather than civilian development expertise."