On Wednesday, June 24, a violent earthquake with a seismic moment (Mo) of 7.2, followed by a second of 7.5 with its epicenter underground in the State of Yaracuy, struck northern and central Venezuela. Although the geophysical epicenter was located in the State of Yaracuy, where fortunately the damage to infrastructure was less severe, the destructive wave unleashed its true fury on major urban centers and coastal real estate developments: Caracas, La Guaira, Tucacas, Morón, and Puerto Cabello.

While the propaganda of the bourgeois press and local reformism shed crocodile tears invoking “national unity” and “patriotic solidarity,” the harsh reality of capitalist production relations imposes itself on the rubble.

Far from being a geological fatality, the material tragedy clearly demonstrates the communist thesis: nature ends up doing the dirty work that imperialist wars usually do, with the violent destruction of the productive forces and constant capital, which senile capitalism desperately needs, suffocated by its cyclical crises of overproduction.

Historical antecedents of the cynical recurrence of bourgeois negligence

The seismic history of the bourgeois Venezuelan republic is marked by catastrophes whose high human costs reflect the absolute subordination of housing construction to real estate rents and employers’ profits.

1812 and 1900: Since the great earthquakes of the 19th century, the overcrowding of the workforce in vulnerable structures has highlighted the total indifference of the ruling classes towards the living conditions of the underprivileged.

The earthquake of July 29, 1967 (magnitude 6.5) set the modern precedent. The collapse of residential buildings in densely populated areas like Altamira and Los Palos Grandes (Caracas) exposed urban land speculation and the criminal use of cheap materials by the construction bourgeoisie. Nearly sixty years later, the geography of destruction is being repeated in the same municipalities of the capital and extends along the central coast, demonstrating that under capitalism there is no scientific memory, only the memory of dividends.

It is the Blood of the Workers that Fertilizes the Soil of the Tourist and Industrial Centers

Scientific estimates and initial local reports confirm the massive collapse of housing, hotel, and service infrastructure. The greatest damage is concentrated in the Capital District and the State of La Guaira (declared a disaster zone), as well as along the coastal axis of Tucacas, Morón, and Puerto Cabello. There have already been over 2,500 deaths, thousands injured, and a frightening figure of over 50,000 missing beneath destroyed structures. But the death toll will continue to rise until it almost coincides with the number of missing.

For capital, this leap in scale in death, from thousands to tens of thousands, is not a brake: it confirms the scope of the "freed up space" and the future surplus workforce that will be willing to accept the most miserable conditions in the reconstruction contracts that national and international construction companies will win.

Statistically, the human massacre has an unmistakable class connotation. It was, is, and will be primarily the blood of workers that was shed in these events. While the bourgeoisie and the upper bureaucracy took refuge in safe villas built according to rigorous engineering standards, the urban proletariat and service sector workers were buried alive.

The collapse ferociously hit the overcrowded public housing complexes of Caracas and La Guaira, as well as the hotel and commercial facilities of Tucacas and the Morón-Puerto Cabello axis, where workers flock to boost the regional tourism and port system. The wave of death and destruction unleashed by the earthquake did not strike a "happy world", a "paradise", but rather a region where the salaried population lives tormented by starvation wages, unemployment, inadequate nutrition, access to potable water, stable electricity, and an efficient healthcare system; in other words, a country where the full social impoverishment effect of the capitalist economy is visible.

False Solidarity and the Reconstruction Affair

After the disaster, the orgy of reconstruction will immediately begin, a lucrative banquet in which the imperialist powers and the factions of the local bourgeoisie will compete for shares of capital valorization in strategic areas for the bourgeois leisure market and manufacturing logistics.

1. The currency market exposes mercantile cynicism

While the population was dying under the rubble, the market economy demonstrated its total humanitarian indifference. Between June 24 and 30, the official dollar exchange rate published by the Central Bank of Venezuela soared from 621.52 bolívares to over 633.36, an increase of almost 12 bolívares in less than a week. This de facto devaluation, in the midst of the worst emergency of the century, demonstrates that the law of value and financial speculation know no respite or mercy.

In Venezuela, the government, business leaders, trade unions, and opportunists of all stripes had already demonstrated their "humanitarian" solidarity—that is, with the bourgeoisie—with the concerted declaration on May 1st not to increase paltry wages.

Meanwhile, as an example of business humanitarianism, 30 workers at the Catania supermarket in Puerto Cabello had to resign en masse when the owner tried to force them to work even though an adjacent building was tilted and at risk of collapsing onto that commercial premises.

2. The urban planning of disaster

In the coming days, bourgeois parties will unleash a sterile media polemic over the quality of materials and violations of building codes. This is an ideological smokescreen. The debate conceals the fact that many of these mega-constructions should never have existed. The capitalist mode of production irrationally attracts extremely high population concentrations in cities like Caracas and high-rise constructions devoid of any technical sense, with the sole purpose of maximizing land yield. This gigantism is particularly grotesque in the tourist area of ​​La Guaira and the coastal axis of Tucacas, Morón, and Puerto Cabello. These mass tourism developments, marina complexes, and vacation towers criminally attack the landscape and the environmental balance, having been erected on vulnerable lands solely for the purposes of money laundering, real estate speculation, and the appropriation of economic surpluses by the ruling class.

3. The imperialist landing of the United States

The emergency aid deployed by the United States government is not for philanthropic purposes. In the current context of occupation and de facto political tutelage in Venezuela, following the kidnapping of President Maduro last January, the US administration controls and blocks funds from Venezuelan oil sales abroad. Therefore, US imperialism controls the money and—under the guise of humanitarian assistance channeled through international agencies—will directly manage the awarding of multi-billion dollar contracts for the reconstruction of roads, ports, hotels, and housing. US construction companies are landing on the central and western coasts, along with their partners and front men from the local bourgeoisie (both from the traditional opposition and business cliques linked to the Bolivarian Republic, unconcerned about Maduro’s replacement by Delsy Rodríguez) to share the spoils of rebuilding damaged infrastructure and reviving the lucrative beach tourism industry.

It is no coincidence or even a sign of philanthropy that the International Monetary Fund and the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean (CAF) announced, almost simultaneously and rapidly, the creation of special funds to finance the reconstruction of collapsed infrastructure. Multinational financial capital operates with the speed of a vulture: where reformism and civic sensibilities see a human tragedy, imperialist technocrats see an extraordinary window of opportunity to revive cycles of accumulation and credit servitude. These "emergency" credits are not donations; they constitute new sovereign debt that will fall directly on the shoulders of the Venezuelan working class through future austerity plans and regressive fiscal reforms. The IMF and the CAF intervene to protect the profits of the large construction monopolies, ensuring that the Venezuelan bourgeois State has the liquidity needed to pay the contracts of the multinationals and their local bourgeois partners, while implementing new mechanisms of financial blackmail.

The Real "Double Blow" is the Double Exploitation of Workers

The June 2026 catastrophe brings the cycle of wage labor exploitation to a close. It will be proletarian labor, faced with extremely precarious working conditions and starvation wages, that will have to clear the rubble and rebuild every luxury hotel, every port, and every destroyed building. Once reconstruction is complete, the laws of the capitalist market and its paltry wages will once again prevent them from accessing tourist infrastructure and decent housing.

The working class’s only response to the speculative barbarity of the disaster is to break with the electoral farce, break with the traitorous union leaderships, and organize strikes for wage increases, pension increases, and shorter working hours. These will be increasingly widespread, coordinated, and united struggles, culminating in an indefinite general strike to achieve these goals, culminating in their revolutionary culmination in the seizure of political power by the working class, organized in genuine class-based unions and led by the International Communist Party, for the purpose of destroying the system of wage labor exploitation, which transforms the death of proletarians into oxygen for Capital.