The Vultures Arrived Before the Rescue Teams

Big earthquakes flatten buildings into rubble the same way everywhere. Last Wednesday, when back-to-back quakes of magnitudes 7.5 and 7.2 rocked a large part of my native Venezuela, I found some dark consolation in the thought that such tragedies are impartial to place. The tectonic plates deep below had exerted their formidable powers because this is what they sometimes do. The suffering would be acute, but its precedents were universal and as old as the Earth.But Venezuela’s man-made disasters didn’t take long to exacerbate the natural one. For 28 years and counting, Venezuela’s rulers have stolen or squandered much of the oil revenue of the most oil-rich country in the world. Oligarchs pocketed the petrodollars of the late-aughts oil boom and left the nation somehow poorer and more indebted. In the hours just before the earthquakes struck, the regime released a total figure for the amount that it owed its creditors: $240 billion. The humanitarian consequences of this wastefulness were well documented before last Wednesday. Now they have acquired a fresh urgency.In the crucial first 24 hours following the quakes, the government response was practically nonexistent. In an upscale neighborhood in Caracas, ill-equipped police officers illuminated the rubble with cellphone flashlights, and volunteers used their bare hands to clear debris. Elsewhere, people had to make do with even less. In La Guaira, a hard-hit coastal city near Caracas, some survivors waited days for help sifting through the wreckage to find out whether their family members were alive or dead. Some said they could hear the screams of their loved ones but were unable to reach them without heavy machinery, which did not come in time. An unusual number of vultures have been seen flying over what’s left of La Guaira in recent days. The birds appear to have arrived in some disaster zones before the rescue teams.[Read: A search through the rubble of two towers in Venezuela]The lack of preparation is unforg