The air mixes the smell of saltiness and the more stubborn one of cement dust that has never completely settled. In La Guaira, not far from Caracas, where the earthquake destroyed hundreds of buildings, there is still an unspecified number of missing people. It is the suspended time of disasters, when the numbers, enormous, almost abstract, become the only way to express the pain that families cannot accept and communicate.
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The earthquake has amplified the economic collapse: inflation is the highest in the world, over 500% annually, the bolivar, the currency, continues to lose ground against the dollar. And, last but not least, with oil at 100 dollars a barrel, Venezuelans receive nothing.
The earthquake struck a country already grappling with a historic and fragile transition. On January 3, 2026, U.S. special forces captured Nicolás Maduro in Caracas in the operation “Absolute Resolve,” transferring him to New York with charges of drug trafficking and terrorism. In his place governs, as interim president, former vice president Delcy Rodríguez, with no free elections yet announced; a governance with very limited sovereignty. Donald Trump’s threats were not subliminal: “If Delcy does not do what we tell her, she will meet the same fate as Maduro.”
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“People thought that everything would change the next day. It was not so – says José Rodríguez of the Avsi foundation – : doctors and teachers still earn less than 20 dollars a month, over two million children remain out of school.”
The reckoning of 240 billion dollars
In the coming weeks Venezuela will make public, through the U.S. investment bank Centerview Partners, the “viability plan” that will lay the foundations for the largest sovereign debt restructuring in history. The total amount Caracas is about to declare is 240 billion dollars: well beyond market estimates, which ranged between 150 and 200 billion, and even higher than the Greek default of 2012, so far the reference case for sovereign debt analysts. Here arises the first controversy: why Centerview Partners? An American investment bank, close to President Trump, according to American press sources.
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