Critiquing the Delcy Rodriguez Government's Disaster Response

Most of the discussions I have had with journalists so far has been about the Delcy Rodriguez government’s response to the disaster and the Venezuelan people’s anger. I think this radio report by Tibisay Zea for The World hit the right issues.

There is justified outrage at what can only be termed a hollow response, especially when the government has been so efficient in recent years at repressing protest, censoring media, coddling Donald Trump and signing international economic agreements. It simply underlines the fact that this is a government that has been structured and focused on benefitting those in power, not the Venezuelan people. This is a point hit well by Regina Garcia Cano in her piece for AP.

A couple of directions of critique I am not yet convinced by is the idea that the government is manipulating the count of the dead. Much of what is said in social media rests on a really basic misunderstanding of the difference between an estimate and a count. The first is a statistic derived from an assessment of the area, number of buildings, population and size of the earthquakes. The second is the number of bodies actually confirmed and registered. It is normal that there will be a big gap since an estimate can be made immediately and an actual count will take weeks.

There is, of course, the precedent of the mudslides in 1999 which are frequently said to have caused “10,000 to 30,000” deaths. That is a huge range and can be explained by the nature of that disaster in which the entire geography changed and huge areas were covered over by many meters of earth containing cadavers that were never dug up. Other bodies washed out to sea. In this case, the deceased will actually be in collapsed buildings and presumably will be recovered with the removal of debris. Thus, the structural causes of an undercount are not the same.

This is not to say that the government will not manipulate it, just that, as I told CNN, the evidence provided so far is not compelling. Furthermore, it is not clear to me that a government that will depend on foreign aid for recovery, has a big motivation to undercount the victims.

Another direction of critique that I think is not yet compelling is the idea that the government is systematically preventing search and rescue teams or citizens from doing their work or that there are soldiers with arms instead of shovels in La Guaira. The one thing the government actually has the capacity to do is coordinate and organize and that necessarily means preventing some well-intentioned people from going where or doing what they want.

This makes for easy videos and breezy analysis that can portray officials as wanting to prevent search, rescue and aid. Here again, this does not mean that the government is doing it well, or that some officials make poor decisions or take the opportunity for corrupt interactions. It just means that I have not seen compelling evidence of a systematic effort to prevent foreign aid from reaching its destination.

This goes both ways. Delcy Rodriguez deserves applause for actually holding a press conference with international journalists asking real questions. But the actual content of responses such as this one, arguing that the media’s questions actually came from a (presumably opposition) “laboratory” was horrendous. Even more absurd was the claim that said laboratories “activated” an “everyone to La Guaira” plan to presumably impede relief efforts. It was also insensitive to the victims as well as the large number of citizens who went to La Guaira the day after the earthquake with the sincerest of intentions to help their fellow Venezuelans in need. She could easily have portrayed this citizen mobilization as having served a vital function given the difficult of government response, which she had already recognized

So far, the U.S. has largely escaped criticism, as Tibisay Zea writes here for the Christian Science Monitor. It does not surprise me that people have a largely positive view of the U.S. and international efforts, given the flaccid response of their own government. In any case, as I have mentioned to every journalist I have talked to, the search and rescue phase is just the beginning of a disaster response. Now will come the real test of leadership with the reconstruction effort. To obtain significant international resources and administer them effectively will require planning, institutional development and execution. There is a huge space here for success and failure.