The earth has not stopped trembling, but the bureaucrats have. As another aftershock ripples through the crumbling bones of Caracas, the official response is best described as a masterclass in absence. The government, presumably too busy polishing the silverware in Miraflores, has left its citizens to sift through rubble with bare hands and the desperate hope that neighbours will prove more reliable than the state. It is a scene of such profound abandonment that even the vultures look embarrassed.
I stood on a street that used to be a street, now a geological protest against the concept of infrastructure. A man named Eduardo, his forehead leaking a thin red tributary into his eye, was digging through concrete with a spatula. A spatula, for God's sake. The official rescue teams? They are, according to a woman clutching a photograph of a child who is no longer where she left him, 'contemplating the logistics.' In a country where logistics often means deciding which queue to die in, this is not reassuring.
The aftershock wasn't even a big one. A mere 4.5 on the Richter scale, they said. But when your foundation is made of political decay and your walls are held together by the memory of oil wealth, every tremor is a final warning. The nerves here are frayed like the rope that held a collapsing balcony I saw earlier, its residents now learning to fly without wings.
Meanwhile, the international community is offering thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and prayers, the universal currency for disasters that are inconveniently located. The Red Cross has set up a tent, but it is guarded by men with guns who demand to see paperwork. Paperwork. In a city where the ground has no paperwork, where buildings have no permission to fall, we are expected to file forms.
I found a minister, or a man who claimed to be a minister, standing on a pile of rubble that used to be his office. He was giving a speech about resilience. Resilience, that lovely word the powerful use to describe the suffering of others. The irony was so thick you could spread it on a biscuit, if you had a biscuit, which you don't, because the bakeries are all gone, collapsed into dust or despair.
This is not a rescue effort. This is a survival exercise. The Venezuelans are fending for themselves because the apparatus of the state has been hollowed out, its organs sold for scrap. The aftershock was just a reminder that when the earth moves, the government stays still. And so we dig with spatulas. We use our hands. We hope that the next tremor is the last, or that we are not under the next collapse.
I have drunk my gin. It tasted of sorrow and bureaucratic failure. The bottle is empty, but the story is not. The aftershocks will continue, as will the neglect. And somewhere, a man with a spatula will keep digging, because that is what you do when the world falls on you and no one is coming.
