Two devastating earthquakes have plunged Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, into her first crisis, posing a crucial test of the Trump administration’s bet that she can transform the country into a more functional, compliant ally.
Hollowed out by years of economic collapse and corruption under Rodríguez and her predecessors, Venezuela’s army, civil defense, and other emergency responders are weaker than ever, analysts say. A botched response could become an inflection point for Rodríguez’s political future and the Trump administration’s experiment in governing there.
The stakes were becoming clear less than 48 hours after a one-two punch of quakes over magnitude-7 rocked the country. In Catia La Mar, just outside the nation’s capital, where some of the heaviest damage had been felt, Rafael Montilla said he and his neighbors were still working alone to find survivors. No state rescue squad or security force had arrived at his barrio by Friday, he said.
Montilla and his neighbors spent much of Thursday night digging through rubble with their bare hands searching for survivors. They managed to pull out five people, including an infant.
Some residents mounted grates on the backs of their motorcycles to take the injured to health clinics. Others used their own cars to deliver water. In La Guaira, the coastal state where dozens of apartment buildings collapsed, residents were pleading for heavy machinery to reach relatives trapped under debris and slabs of concrete.
“The biggest response came from the people, what we did ourselves,” said Montilla, 40, echoing what many Venezuelans say has been slow, or nonexistent, support from the government in response to one of the deadliest tragedies in the country’s history.
U.S. officials have indicated they are intent on helping Rodríguez’s government weather the crisis. Secretary of State Marco Rubio pledged a “whole-of-government” response, and the U.S. has committed $150 million in aid, dispatched disaster-response and urban search-and-rescue teams, and mobilized military airlift and logistics support.
But it may already be too late. The quakes killed more than 900 people and left some 3,360 injured, Venezuelan authorities said, a toll that is sure to rise. Some 51,000 people were missing as of Friday afternoon, according to a crowdsourced online registry.
“The earthquakes are going to expose even more how deeply rotten the administration of the state has been, especially when it comes to providing healthcare services,” said James Story, who served as U.S. ambassador to Venezuela under the first Trump and Biden administrations.
Rodríguez, who could use the crisis to strengthen her hold on power, has highlighted the successes of the response while acknowledging the grave catastrophe that had befallen her country. On Friday morning, Rodríguez went on television, flanked by aides and military advisers, to reassure Venezuelans that the state was mobilizing. She said food and water supplies have been stocked, and that La Guaira will be taken over by the military.
“We’ve also saved dozens of survivors,” she said, “which gives us happiness.”
The Trump administration wants to showcase that its new partnership with Rodríguez can deliver what Nicolás Maduro’s government couldn’t: stability, effective disaster relief, and a more functional Venezuelan state. Trump has repeatedly praised her for doing a “fantastic” job, and portrayed Venezuela as a country on the road to recovery.
“The people running it, they are our people,” he said about Venezuela on Tuesday. “They’re great people.”
The earthquakes are laying bare how little the machinery of the state has changed since Maduro’s removal. Months later, international aid agencies say the country is still grappling with a severe humanitarian crisis, food insecurity and public services that can’t meet basic health needs.
Venezuela has already been experiencing a surge in public protests. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project has recorded more than 1,400 in the first half of 2026, more than double the total for all of 2025.
With weak public support in polls, Rodríguez has sought to rebrand politically. She regularly meets with American bankers and businessmen, portraying herself as a champion for foreign investment. And in recent months she has been on a nationwide tour that appears like a presidential campaign, where she has ditched her socialist party’s preferred red colors for light blue.
“A disaster of this scale presents an opportunity to consolidate her position as a national leader rather than simply as Maduro’s caretaker successor,” said Tiziano Breda, a Latin America analyst for the ACLED. But “any perceived mishandling of the response, including corruption, delays, or the politicization of aid distribution, could trigger unrest among an increasingly exhausted population.”
Rodríguez has tried to demonstrate that she is the more pragmatic leader of a new Venezuela, publicly accepting disaster aid from former adversaries and embracing U.S. assistance after years of hostility under Maduro, who rejected aid as a Trojan horse for foreign intervention.
Her administration’s response will also gauge how far she is willing to roll back Maduro-era controls in a national emergency. The social-media platform X, blocked under her predecessor, appeared to become available through some providers on Thursday after U.N. human-rights officials urged Caracas to lift restrictions to allow Venezuelans to search for missing relatives.
By Friday, however, rights groups and opposition political parties complained that Venezuelan police had tried to halt them from collecting and transporting humanitarian supplies, drawing allegations that the regime was seeking to politicize the disaster, which Rodríguez’s government denies.
There has also been increased scrutiny of whether Rodríguez’s government will allow independent media and aid groups to operate freely and provide transparent casualty figures.
Natural disasters have helped Latin American leaders either consolidate power or lose it. In 1999, Maduro’s mentor Hugo Chávez capitalized on catastrophic mudslides that killed thousands of people—near where the earthquake did most of its damage—to deepen his case for remaking the Venezuelan state. The 1985 earthquake in Mexico City dealt a blow to the ruling PRI party and galvanized civic society.
Rodríguez—and her allies in Washington—are eager to prevent this disaster from becoming a similar indictment of government failure. The U.S. Southern Command on Friday said it was boosting American military support to Venezuela to help assess damage to airfields and residential areas, as well as transporting lifesaving supplies that the South American country often lacks.
“The success or failure of Venezuela, to some extent, falls directly on the shoulders of the Trump administration,” said Story.
Write to Vera Bergengruen at vera.bergengruen@wsj.com and Kejal Vyas at kejal.vyas@wsj.com
