More than 1,400 people have died since an earthquake ravaged Venezuela earlier this week, and I blame socialism.
I know ideology can’t shift tectonic plates. But it can leave a society unprepared to face disaster and render a people unable to pick up its pieces.
Things were bad before the first road cracked or buildings fell. The numbers were a catastrophe before the first building fell. According to the United Nations, nearly eight million Venezuelans — about one in four citizens — required humanitarian assistance. That level of need for a country sitting atop one of the Earth’s largest oil reserves is something only central planning can create.
The economist Friedrich Hayek said the problem with central planning is that the knowledge on which a society runs is not held in any single mind or ministry. It’s scattered across millions of people, each aware of some small fact — what is needed, where, and how badly — that no central authority could ever gather in one room.
In free societies like ours, market prices ensure that knowledge is spread out and accessible in times of need. A command economy throws that mechanism away and tries to do the calculating from a single desk. This system fails even in calm times, as Venezuela’s bread lines, empty shelves, and hyperinflation have long proved.
After a disaster, those failures turn lethal. A government that cannot keep a pharmacy stocked in peacetime will not conjure a rescue operation out of the rubble.
Imagine a man in La Guaira — let’s call him Carlos — who woke up to find his house shaking. Half asleep he rushes outside, and as he stands in the dust he realizes his wife and baby daughters were still inside. From inside the rubble of what was once his home, Carlos hears their call. His family survived. They need to be rescued.
Carlos calls the government’s emergency number, but no one answers. No one comes. There are no trucks, no spreaders, no floodlights, no crew of strangers trained for exactly this. Just a father digging at concrete with his bare hands while the sounds underneath him got quieter and then stopped.
His daughters did not die in the earthquake. They died in the hours after it, in the moments where people in a functioning country would have access to rescue crews and emergency lines: ordinary, unglamorous competence. Carlos’s family died because for 20 years the governments of Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro hollowed out the country in the name of socialism.
In the United States, the consent of the governed enables the government to serve its people, not oppress them. In Venezuela, things have been inverted for a long time, as the earthquake laid bare.
The same security forces that spared no expense breaking up pro-democracy protests have, in the days since the ground shook, mostly stayed out of the rubble. Reporters in La Guaira watched state workers pose for photographs in front of collapsed buildings and then leave without lifting a stone, while their neighbors dug with motorcycle helmets for hard hats and bare hands for tools.
On the night of June 26, the government sealed off the hardest-hit areas and demanded special permits to enter — even as families clawed at concrete crushing the people they loved. Officials said the roads had to be cleared for ambulances to get through. But according to reports, there were just three functioning ambulances in the entire capital city.
I lived the first 16 years of my life in Venezuela. I was old enough to understand exactly what I was leaving behind, and young enough to get a chance to start again in a country that works.
Most people only ever live one of those lives. They either grow up inside the failure and never escape it, or they grow up inside the safety and never think to question it. I ended up with both, and the gap between them is not an abstraction to me.
That’s why I was aghast when, two days before the earthquakes in Venezuela, my adopted country handed a string of victories to candidates who ran, proudly, under the banner of socialism. Democratic socialism, they’re careful to say — and they’re right that the word matters. New York is not Caracas. Mamdani is not Maduro.
But enthusiasm for these candidates runs hottest among people who, like most Americans my age, have never once seen the bill come due. I don’t blame them. It’s easy to like the idea of the city running the grocery store when you’ve never lived somewhere the state couldn’t keep one stocked. It’s easy to trust the single desk with more and more of daily life when you’ve never heard the silence on the other end of an emergency line.
This earthquake didn’t break Venezuela. It revealed a country that was already broken, and stripped away the last of the cover that had been hiding the damage. The tragedy isn’t just that the plates shifted. The tragedy is that they shifted under a people whose government made sure they’d have nothing left to land on.
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Olga Benacerraf de Strulovic is a J.D. Candidate at the University of Chicago Law School. She was born and raised in Venezuela’s capital city of Caracas, and was one of many Venezuelans who fled the country during Nicolás Maduro’s rule.
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