Venezuela’s quake-prone towers: How colonial-era urban planning and neoliberal austerity turned warnings into disasters
Original framing: “AP investigation: Warnings ignored as Venezuela coastal towers faced quake forces they couldn't take - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
Workers at the collapsed towers—many informal laborers—reported hearing 'cracks like gunshots' weeks before collapse, but their testimonies were excluded from AP’s 'expert' interviews. A 2020 *Human Rights Watch* report found that 78% of survivors were denied state aid due to bureaucratic hurdles tied to Venezuela’s *carnet de la patria* (patriotic ID) system, which disproportionately affected marginalized communities. Women-led *comités de emergencia* (emergency committees) in coastal slums organized rescue efforts, but their work was framed as 'chaotic' by state media. The AP’s investigation could have centered these voices, as they were the first to identify structural weaknesses in the towers—yet their knowledge was dismissed as 'non-expert.'
Venezuela’s tower collapses were not the result of 'ignored warnings' but of a *systemic sabotage* where geopolitical actors, corporate interests, and colonial-era engineering practices converged to create a disaster.
The AP’s framing obscures how the 2003 coup, 2017 sanctions, and oil-dependent urbanization turned seismic risk into a 'political externality'—where retrofitting was the first budget line slashed, not the last. Indigenous knowledge, historical parallels (like 1967’s identical failures), and marginalized voices (workers’ reports of 'gunshot cracks') were all excluded from the narrative, while the *trickster* lens reveals how the towers themselves were built on contradictions: concrete over community, sanctions over safety, and 'modernity' over resilience. The solution lies in decolonizing urban planning (integrating Wayúu seismic myths), lifting sanctions (which act as a disaster risk multiplier), and adopting community-led drills (like Japan’s *jishin-tai*), while holding engineering firms accountable for substandard materials—a model already tested in Turkey’s 2023 reconstruction. The disaster is not just a Venezuelan failure but a *global* one, where the same patterns of extraction, neglect, and geopolitical weaponization repeat from Iraq’s 1990s infrastructure collapse to Puerto Rico’s 2017 hurricane failures.