The images from La Guaira are not merely tragic. They are emblematic. A building, a structure meant to shelter and protect, has become a tomb.
Rescuers whisper, ‘no one move’, as if the very ground itself is a trembling patient. And in this plea, one hears the silent echo of a nation’s entire history. Why do we insist on being surprised?
The fall of the Roman Empire was not a single cataclysmic event. It was a slow, grinding decay of institutions, infrastructure, and civic virtue. Venezuela, for a decade now, has been our contemporary theatre of this same tragedy.
Those trapped under the rubble are not just victims of a singular engineering failure. They are the living proof of a system that has crumbled long before the concrete ever gave way. The socialist experiment, the oil curse, the populist theatricality: these have all combined to produce a society where the very idea of maintenance, of gradual repair, has been abandoned for revolutionary gesture.
We look at La Guaira and see a building collapse. We should see an entire state’s intellectual and moral collapse. The rescuers move carefully.
But the greatest care, the real caution, should have been applied years ago. No one moved then to fix the foundations of the nation. Now, no one moves for fear of causing further ruin.
That is the tragic irony of Venezuela’s slow motion disaster: the same paralysis that destroyed the building now preserves the bodies. We mourn properly, of course. But let us also think.
Let us compare. Let us realise that a civilisation that cannot maintain its own infrastructure is a civilisation that has already decided, subconsciously, to perish. La Guaira is a tombstone for a certain kind of modern hubris.
And still, no one moves.
