By Maxwell Briceno and Sarah Kinosian
LA GUAIRA, Venezuela, June 29 (Reuters) – When late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez built this coastal housing development bearing his name as part of his socialist revolution, residents found a fresh start after deadly floods had decimated the area more than a decade earlier.
But after two back‑to‑back earthquakes flattened parts of the 1,100-unit complex on Wednesday, engineers are urging the Venezuelan government to swiftly audit similar public housing that is still standing.
“I lost my whole apartment,” said Yelsa Rojas, who since 2015 has lived on the second floor of the building colloquially known as ‘Los Cocos’, for its proximity to a beach of the same name.
“We think everyone on the second floor is dead,” she said. The only reason she’s alive is because she was at a medical appointment when the quakes hit, she added.
While engineers and construction specialists said it was too soon to declare exactly why individual buildings collapsed, decades of neglect, a lack of enforcement of building codes and shoddy licensing practices under Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, likely exacerbated the disaster’s human cost.
They also pointed to soil instability in the worst-hit state of La Guaira, where Los Cocos is located, making it an especially risky location to build.
As rescuers race to find those buried in the rubble, civil engineers fear other buildings might still be vulnerable after the quakes and want to help the government ensure they are structurally sound and that residents can safely live there. So far the government has met with the country’s main professional engineer association, but has not begun assessments, frustrating some.
UNDER FIRE
“It’s criminal that the government is not taking up offers from engineers and universities more quickly,” said Enrique Larrañaga, an architect and urban planner at Simon Bolivar University who has provided guidance to the government on national development.
Venezuela’s Communication Ministry did not respond to a request for comment. On Sunday, interim President Delcy Rodriguez announced she was putting together a commission to evaluate damaged housing structures. She did not say when the evaluations would begin.
The government has already been criticized for not deploying much-needed heavy equipment and search-and-rescue teams earlier. That left residents on their own, using their hands, shovels and ropes as they scrambled to find relatives in the crucial first days after the disaster.
By Saturday, state TV showed heavy construction equipment sorting through crushed brick and concrete. Residents said foreign rescue teams had helped them pull out bodies, and called for reinforcements.
Larrañaga said many developments, rushed by the government for political purposes, have proven to be safety hazards over the years, while the country also lost much of its engineering know-how during its economic collapse starting in 2013.
“They need to give people that have know-how access to information and resources,” he added.
PRONE TO DESTRUCTION
Because the government has not yet begun its own assessments, volunteer engineers have been offering their services to citizens, said Glennys Gonzalez, an architect and civil engineer coordinating dozens of professionals.
Her group’s initial assessment of the damage suggests that codes were not adhered to in many cases, but studies must be done to determine why some structures withstood the impact and others completely pancaked, Gonzalez said.
La Guaira was also the site of another of Venezuela’s worst natural disasters, when mudslides wiped out entire coastal communities in 1999, killing 10,000 to 30,000 people.
Because steep mountains drop sharply to a narrow coastal strip in the area, floods and landslides tend to channel directly through populated areas, said Richard Casanova, director of Venezuela’s College of Engineers, the main professional association that advises the government.
This geography has soft soil, he added, making it particularly prone to destruction during the double earthquakes. Over 50,000 people were killed in Turkey and Syria when they were hit by a similar phenomenon in 2023.
Four days after the 7.2-magnitude and 7.5-magnitude earthquakes, Venezuelan officials confirmed on Sunday at least 1,450 people dead and 3,150 injured. Citizen-led efforts to register the missing have collected nearly 50,000 names.
QUALITY CONTROL
Nicolás Labrópoulos, a civil engineer and professor at Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas, said the loose sand, gravel and debris that La Guaira sits on can make seismic waves travel more slowly, but increase in intensity, amplifying the shaking.
Trapped between the mountains and the sea, the soil can become even more fluid during an earthquake, making construction there riskier, said Casanova.
Many private developments there also collapsed, likely due to a mix of those same soil weaknesses, years of corrosion and lack of quality control, he added, noting that older buildings may also not have been retrofitted to withstand such impact after the government updated codes following a 1967 earthquake.
“You can build there,” he said, “but you have to really adhere to strict codes, and given how the government has handled construction over the past two-and-a-half decades, I have my doubts in many cases.”
After La Guaira’s 1999 catastrophe, the government updated construction laws and building codes, said Casanova. But the problem in Venezuela is not the code, it is a lack of enforcement, he said.
Chavez’s government began building complexes like Los Cocos right before the country’s 2012 elections as part of a push to erect millions of cheap units across the nation. Maduro continued the project, expanding access to housing for low‑income Venezuelans.
But as Chavez and then Maduro centralized power, institutions became weaker and so did quality controls over new construction and maintenance of existing structures, say architects and engineers.
Developments were built quickly by a mix of state agencies and contractors from China, Turkey and Belarus under military oversight but with little public disclosure, Gonzalez and Casanova said.
A lack of enforcement of the more stringent codes in public buildings also signaled to private builders they could get away with cutting corners, Casanova said, in contrast to countries like Chile where such rules were more rigorously enforced and death tolls have been relatively low.
A magnitude‑8.8 earthquake in Chile in 2010 killed about 525 people, an outcome widely attributed to strict, well‑enforced building codes. By contrast, a weaker magnitude‑7.0 quake in Haiti in 2010 killed hundreds of thousands.
Shoddy construction and corruption schemes linked to public housing in Venezuela have been reported by several organizations and news outlets in recent years. Independent reporting and studies found several buildings were constructed in geologically risky areas, some with cracks and leaks, and a range of other deficiencies.
“The history of Chavez’s public housing is one of corruption and low-quality constructions built without supervision, inspection or adherence to specific codes in many cases,” said Casanova.
(Reporting by Maxwell Briceno in La Guaira and Sarah Kinosian in Mexico City; Additional reporting by Reuters in Caracas; Editing by Christian Plumb and Lincoln Feast.)
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