CARACAS, Venezuela—With time running out, firefighters and paramedics from Virginia equipped with concrete-cutting saws, acoustic devices and precision-locating equipment gingerly pulled out a father and son trapped for four days.
Laid out on makeshift stretchers, they were carried to a nearby ambulance. Residents who have seen little but death since twin earthquakes hit last Wednesday broke out in applause and shouted, “Gracias! Gracias!”
By contrast, crowds jeered at the acting Venezuelan president, Delcy Rodríguez, chanting “Get out! Get out!” when she went to visit one hard-hit neighborhood. Venezuelans searching for loved ones mocked Venezuelan National Guard troops, yelling that they were incompetent and only good for crushing protests. Some people have lambasted servicemembers for taking selfies outside flattened buildings. In one widely shared video, a man drives a soldier and an official from his ransacked home.
The Trump administration is throwing resources into Venezuela’s earthquake response, hoping the relief operation will showcase the benefits of its unlikely alliance with Rodríguez’s interim government. But amid the ruins near the turquoise waters of the Caribbean coast, the effort is colliding with ordinary Venezuelans who revile their government.
“People don’t realize, she’s under the rubble, too,” said Martin Rodil, a Venezuelan activist who has worked with U.S. law enforcement to investigate Venezuelan officials, speaking of Rodríguez.
The earthquake disaster has become the first major test of Washington’s effort to make Rodríguez’s rule palatable to Venezuelans—but public anger is boiling over as the death count Monday rose to 1,719, with tens of thousands still missing. Three Americans are confirmed dead, with 12 more missing, U.S. officials said. In all, some 16,000 people have been left homeless after hundreds of residential buildings collapsed or were left uninhabitable.
While the Trump administration has thrown its support behind Rodríguez since a U.S. military raid captured her predecessor, the strongman Nicolás Maduro, the government she leads is known for corruption and mismanagement that doomed the economy and led more than eight million people to flee abroad.
“Everyone can see what is now happening in La Guaira,” said Diego Arria, a former high-ranking Venezuelan diplomat who lives in Miami, referring to the state where the heaviest quake damage has been reported. “We’ve had a natural catastrophe and Venezuela doesn’t have the means or resources to deal with this because these people have robbed the country and left it destroyed.”
Arria said he worried that the U.S. might end up hurting its own interests by siding too closely with Rodríguez. “I think what they’re doing is causing resentment among the people there,” he said. “Today it’s against the Delcy government. Tomorrow it’ll be against the United States.”
Praise of the government’s efforts from U.S. officials, including the top U.S. diplomat in the country, has sharpened resentment among Venezuelans who fear Washington is using the relief efforts to bolster Rodríguez despite widespread anger at Venezuela’s response.
The diplomat, John Barrett, told a Colombian reporter that Washington had “a great deal of confidence…in the local authorities,” vouching for the Rodríguez government even as many Venezuelans accused it of bungling the response.
“I have seen total transparency and a concern for taking care of the people,” he said.
Trump officials are casting the U.S. response as broader than humanitarian relief efforts. American military forces have reopened the country’s main airport and seaport, coordinated international arrivals, set up medical facilities, and begun to plan long-term reconstruction efforts with the Rodríguez government.
“The United States is really driving this response,” Jeremy Lewin, a senior State Department official in charge of foreign assistance, told reporters on Monday. “We are not going to leave until the job is done.”
As of Monday, the U.S. had doubled its aid commitment to $300 million, including $100 million for the U.N.-led international response. Officials said they are looking into longer-term financing of reconstruction efforts through multilateral lenders and Venezuela’s oil revenues, which are being held in accounts managed by the U.S. Treasury.
The U.S. has deployed more than 300 search-and-rescue personnel from four teams, including teams from Los Angeles County, Florida and Fairfax County, Va., officials said. The teams include heavy rescue equipment, dogs and specialists trained to find and extract people trapped under rubble.
“We’re 100% focused on saving lives,” Barrett said in the interview with the Colombian reporter.
Since arriving late last week, U.S. military personnel have repaired and certified one runway at Caracas’s main international airport after both runways were damaged and part of the air-traffic control tower collapsed, U.S. officials said. The restored runway can now handle a dozen C-17 military transports and other heavy aircraft to land daily with relief supplies from the U.S. and other countries. U.S. personnel are helping to manage air traffic, unloading the planes, and moving aid to other destinations.
U.S. Marines are also repairing the damaged port at La Guaira so it can accept relief supplies, officials said. The effort has included helicopters to move personnel and supplies, CH-47 Chinook helicopters to move aid inland, and satellite imagery provided by the U.S. Space Force to assess the damage and help guide the response. The USS Fort Lauderdale, is docked at the port to serve as a logistics hub.
Four U.S.-funded field hospitals have also been set up, officials say.
The State Department has also signed a deal with Starlink to provide emergency satellite internet, and the company will offer free service in Venezuela for at least a month.
The relief efforts have also become a political pressure point in Washington, where some Republican lawmakers have used the crisis to criticize Rodríguez’s government—especially Diosdado Cabello, considered the government’s second-most powerful official—for allegedly limiting access to aid, even as the Trump administration has praised the Venezuelan authorities. Sen. Rick Scott (R., Fla.) urged Rodríguez to “put her agenda aside.”
“While the U.S. increases its presence in Venezuela, we should pick up thug Diosdado Cabello and bring him to justice so he can stop impeding the distribution of aid to those impacted by the earthquake,” Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R., Fla.) posted Sunday on X.
In a widely shared video, an American rescue worker says to Cabello, with people around both of them, “There’s somebody over there we can try and go help. You don’t want to help the person over there?”
Francisco Lermanda, a Chilean search-and-rescue worker, said that Venezuelan soldiers have constantly asked his team members for their documents while they are working, interrupting efforts to find survivors in the ruins of flattened buildings.
One soldier told the Chileans they had orders to check up on the foreign search-and-rescue teams because they could be “Yankee spies,” Lermanda said in a video interview with local journalists.
Write to Kejal Vyas at kejal.vyas@wsj.com and Vera Bergengruen at vera.bergengruen@wsj.com
