The tragic toll of the devastating earthquakes of magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5 that struck Venezuela last week continues to rise.
The death toll has reached 1,450 dead and 3,150 injured, according to the official update on Sunday. Estimates, however, speak of a much higher number of victims, as tens of thousands of people remain missing. A data collection site has recorded approximately 50,000 reports of missing persons, although this number has not been officially confirmed.
The images being broadcast — beyond those circulated by various imperialist mouthpieces to "project power" and dress up the atrocities they have committed against the people with "humanitarianism" — show people digging through rubble with bare hands, trying to recover the dead, to find signs of life in the devastation. They show devastated people searching body bags for their missing loved ones.
The state of La Guaira, which has been declared a disaster zone, remains the epicenter of the tragedy. Residential buildings collapsed like houses of cards, while infrastructure in electricity, water supply, and telecommunications has suffered irreparable damage. Access to the area has been severely restricted, with the government announcing the declaration of a state of military emergency in La Guaira.
The interim president of Venezuela's social democratic government, Delcy Rodríguez, announced on Sunday that 33 people were pulled alive from the rubble. UNICEF estimates that 1.8 million people, including 680,000 children, are in need of humanitarian aid.
The earthquake struck a country of enormous wealth whose people were already severely tested by the atrocities of the USA, who abducted the country's president and cooperate with the social democratic government to promote their interests in a region where they are engaged in a fierce battle with their competitors.
We recall that the International Relations Department of the Central Committee of the KKE expressed its condolences for the losses and its solidarity with the people of Venezuela in a message to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Venezuela, noting characteristically: "Once again it is tragically proven that the poor popular strata are the ones that bear the heavy consequences of the sacrifice of essential anti-seismic protection measures on the altar of capitalist profit, from the deficiencies in infrastructure and personnel related to civil protection."
