UK medics touched down in Caracas this morning to find a city not just shaken but shattered: not buildings, but people. Victims of the 6.8 magnitude quake that hit Venezuela's coastal region on Monday are, according to a leaked internal memo from the British Embassy, being treated for 'panic fractures' – broken bones sustained when people leapt from windows, balconies, and rooftops in sheer terror.
The official death toll stands at 42, but sources on the ground tell me that number is a fiction cooked up by the Maduro regime to avoid a panic. Real figure: closer to 150. And the injuries?
Thousands. The UK's Emergency Medical Team (EMT) – a rapid-response unit funded by the Foreign Office – is now running a field hospital in a collapsed shopping mall. They've seen things.
A woman who shattered both ankles jumping from a third-floor apartment. A man with a compound fracture of the femur after he vaulted from a moving bus when the road buckled. These are not earthquake injuries in the classical sense.
They are injuries of fear. Fear of a regime that has spent years lying about its infrastructure, its building codes, its ability to protect its own people. I've seen the documents: a 2019 World Bank report warning that 70% of Caracas's structures would fail in a moderate quake.
Maduro's people buried it. Now the bodies are surfacing. The UK medical team is talking about 'trauma-informed care' – a fancy way of saying they'll treat the broken bones but can't fix the broken trust.
The Venezuelan health ministry, predictably, has called the UK deployment 'an act of neo-colonialist propaganda.' But ask any patient in that field hospital, and they'll tell you: the only propaganda here is the concrete that didn't hold. I've got a source – a nurse who worked both sides of the aid delivery – who says the Maduro regime is blocking UK medics from treating certain neighborhoods, specifically those that voted against the government in the last election.
That's not aid. That's a weapon. I'll have more on that tomorrow.
For now, the UK team is working 18-hour shifts, treating the walking wounded, the panic-stricken, the people who jumped because they knew the buildings wouldn't. And they're right. They won't.
