How do you describe what is happening in Venezuela? It feels like an impossible task. The scale of this tragedy is so immense that every attempt to make sense of it becomes confusing and overwhelming.
The only way I have managed to even begin processing what is happening is by imagining it as a series of layers. Layers of horror that exist simultaneously, touching every Venezuelan in a different way.
I call them layers not because they happen one after another, or because some matter more than others. I call them layers because they all exist at the same time. While one person is mourning the death of a loved one, another remains trapped beneath the rubble, waiting to be rescued. While a rescuer fights to save a life, someone else watches an entire city disappear before their eyes. Different experiences, all belonging to the same tragedy.
I want to explain what I mean because I believe this way of understanding what we are living through might help, even if only a little, to find some sense of direction within something that feels impossible to comprehend.
Perhaps, if I can separate these layers one by one, this tragedy will stop feeling—if only for a moment—like a shapeless mass of pain.
I will describe them in an order that moves from the most devastating to those that, although different, remain deeply heartbreaking. Not because one hurts more than another, but because each represents a different way of living through the same horror.
The first layer is the layer of those who lost their lives.
With them begins another kind of tragedy: the grief of those who remain. Parents who lost children. Children who lost parents. Brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, partners, friends. People who wake up every morning trying to understand how someone who was here only a few days ago can simply no longer be.
This is the layer where impossible questions live. Why them? Why this way? Why that building and not the one next to it? Why that Wednesday afternoon? How can life change forever in a matter of seconds?
These are questions that desperately search for an answer. And yet, they almost never find one capable of easing the pain. Because there are tragedies that cannot be understood. They can only be survived.
Perhaps that is the cruelest characteristic of this first layer: there is nothing left to do. There is no rescue to carry out. No second chances. Only the lifelong task of learning to live with an absence that appeared in a single instant and will remain with those who survived forever.
The second layer is the layer of those who are still alive but remain trapped beneath the rubble.
Here, we encounter the very epitome of horror. To imagine what that truly means is almost unbearable: the confinement, the darkness, the lack of air, water, and food. Not knowing how badly you are injured. Not knowing whether anyone is coming. Not knowing how much time has passed. Or the possibility—almost impossible to imagine—of surviving while the person beside you did not, and remaining trapped next to them for hours, or even days, unable to change anything.
What happens inside the mind of someone in a situation like that? Honestly, I don't know. I don't believe anyone who hasn't lived through something like it can truly know. Perhaps the body, in its immense wisdom, enters a state of survival that quiets every question and directs every remaining resource toward staying alive. Perhaps some cling with all their strength to the miracle of still breathing, trusting that someone will find them. Others, exhausted by pain and the passing hours, may simply wish for it all to end. The truth is that we don't know. And that uncertainty is part of the horror too.
Yet this same layer is also where miracles live.
This is where the rescuers live. Men and women who give every last ounce of their strength to pull another human being out alive. Many of them work without proper equipment, without protection, and sometimes with nothing but their bare hands. What moves me most is the contrast between the extraordinary strength required to lift tons of concrete and the extraordinary gentleness with which they speak to those still trapped below. As they lift the rubble, they hold on to hope. Somehow, they find exactly the words another human being needs to hear to endure one more minute.
And yet, this layer also confronts us with one of the most devastating realizations of this entire tragedy: the scale of the disaster has surpassed our capacity to respond.
When hundreds of buildings collapse at the same time, every rescue demands dozens of people and countless hours of work. Then an unbearable truth emerges: there will not be enough hands for everyone. There will not be enough time. There will almost certainly be people who are still alive but will never be reached. Buildings where rescuers will simply never arrive.
How do you live with a reality like that? How do you begin to process something so unbearable? I don't have an answer.
As I sit here writing these words, I can feel the air slowly leaving my lungs until I can almost feel them collapse inward with each breath.
The third layer is the layer of those who survived.
Those who made it out of their homes or apartment buildings just seconds before everything collapsed. People who are alive today because of a decision so small that, until that day, it would have seemed completely insignificant.
This is where the kingdom of What if...? begins.
What if I had taken just a few seconds longer to leave? What if I had gone back for my keys, my phone, or my wallet? What if I had taken that nap? What if I had stepped into the shower when I had planned to?
Suddenly, all those tiny, unconscious decisions we make every day become unbearably heavy. Because you realize that a difference of only a few seconds could have determined whether you would be alive today, trapped beneath the rubble, or among those who lost their lives.
I believe this is one of trauma's quietest forms. The mind cannot stop rewriting the story. Again and again, it imagines the version in which you made a different choice. It recreates it with cruel precision, as though it were trying to understand what happened, when all it really does is force you to live through it again.
And then the question appears—the one that never truly goes away.
What if...?
Again, and again...
What if...?
The fourth layer is the layer of those who are still alive but have lost everything.
They did not just lose a house. They lost the place where life had happened.
Some lost the apartment where they had raised their children. Others lost the home where they were only beginning to build a family and dream about the future ahead. Some lost the place where they had always imagined growing old. Others lost the place where their dreams were only just beginning to take shape.
A home changes with every stage of life. But its purpose never does, it is where we put down roots. It is where life happens: It was their home, their safe haven.
There is something profoundly destabilizing about losing that: One moment, you feel like you have a place in the world. Seconds later, you discover that you have nothing left. The solid ground on which you built your life has vanished beneath your feet.
It wasn't only the walls that disappeared. The family photographs. The letters. The memories. The heirlooms passed down through generations. Every piece of furniture, every appliance, every book, every small object carried years of effort, sacrifice, and hard work. In a country like Venezuela, many of those possessions represented decades of perseverance.
They weren't just belongings; they were years of life made tangible.
But the tragedy does not end when the building collapses. For many, it is only the beginning.
Overnight, they become displaced.
They sleep in temporary shelters alongside hundreds—sometimes thousands—of other people. They no longer have a room of their own. A bed of their own. A door to close at the end of the day. They depend on the kindness of others to meet their most basic needs, with no idea where they will be living next week, next month, or even next year.
Because losing a home is not simply losing a place. It is losing the sense of safety that place gave you. It is realizing that what you believed would always be there can disappear in a matter of seconds.
There are losses that cannot be measured in money. The grief is for the house itself—for those walls, for the home that offered shelter and safety for so many years. But it is also for everything that home represented. Because when it collapsed, so did the place where the memories of the past, the everyday life of the present, and the dreams of the future had lived.
The fifth layer is the layer of those who still have a home to return to, only to discover that the city waiting for them no longer exists.
Their houses are still standing. Their bedrooms are exactly where they have always been. They can unlock the same front door and sleep in the same bed.
And yet, everything has changed.
Because home does not end at your front door.
It is also the street you walked every day. The neighbor who always waved from the balcony. The bakery on the corner. The beach, the town square, the market, the school. The places where you learned how to live. The landscape your memory recognizes without even thinking.
And then, suddenly, that world is gone.
Perhaps the building where you worked no longer exists. Perhaps your children's school collapsed. Perhaps the little bakery where you bought bread every morning now lies beneath the rubble. Your doctor's office may be gone. Your neighborhood pharmacy. Your best friend's home.
Overnight, it is not only the skyline that changes. The entire structure that supported your everyday life disappears.
You did not only lose a city. You lost the life that city made possible.
And if you choose to stay, the grieving does not end.
Every time you step outside your front door, the tragedy is waiting for you. The streets you once knew are marked by collapsed buildings, empty lots where homes once stood, and places that no longer exist. There will be corners where you will remember exactly who used to live there. Buildings whose absence speaks louder than any ruin ever could.
Rebuilding a city takes years. Until then, those who remain must learn to live surrounded by physical reminders of the disaster. Every trip to work. Every visit to the grocery store. Every walk through the neighborhood becomes a journey through the memory of everything that was lost.
The city will keep the same name.
But it will never feel like the same city again.
And those who remain will have to learn to live, day after day, surrounded by the landscape of a tragedy that refuses to disappear.
The sixth and final layer is perhaps the hardest to understand.
It is the layer where a natural disaster collides with another kind of tragedy—one Venezuelans have known for far too long: the social, economic, and institutional one.
In the middle of a catastrophe like this, you want to believe that everyone will move in the same direction. That every difference will disappear in the face of saving lives. That solidarity will be enough to bring people together.
And yet, it isn't.
One of the most painful realizations is discovering that those trying to help are not only fighting the rubble, the passing hours, and their own exhaustion. They are also forced to fight obstacles created by other human beings. Corruption. Bureaucracy. Personal interests. People who choose power over compassion.
How do you make sense of that?
How do you understand that while some risk their lives to save complete strangers, others stand in the way of help reaching those who need it most?
To me, this is one of the deepest wounds left by this tragedy. The earthquake destroyed buildings and homes. But the absence of humanity destroys something even harder to rebuild: trust.
That is not to say that every institution—or every person within those institutions—is the same. They are not. Among them are extraordinary men and women who have risked their own lives to save others. It would be deeply unfair not to acknowledge them.
But when goodness must also struggle against those who should be making its path easier, horror takes on an entirely different dimension.
Perhaps the hardest thing to accept is that, even in the middle of a tragedy of this magnitude, we must confront—and live alongside—the scavengers of horror.
I am certain there are many other layers I have not been able to describe. And the truth is, their boundaries are rarely clear. They overlap. They intertwine. Every Venezuelan experience them differently.
I grew up between Caracas and La Guaira. I am incredibly fortunate that my loved ones were not in their homes when the earthquake struck. My grandmother's house withstood the violence of the earth. She and my uncle survived. My mother lost her apartment in La Guaira, but she is alive.
And yet, I carry every one of these layers within me.
Because the devastation is so immense that you no longer have to lose someone yourself to feel the weight of this tragedy. We all know someone who lost a loved one. Someone who lost the home where they had built their life. Someone who lost their job, the neighborhood where they grew up, or the future they had imagined.
Perhaps that is why these layers never belong entirely to one person. They spread. They overlap. They pass through all of us.
Writing these words changes nothing. It does not bring back those who lost their lives. It does not rebuild the homes that disappeared. It does not erase the pain of those who must now learn to live with this tragedy. But perhaps giving some of these layers a name makes them just a little less impossible to carry.
And even after writing all of this, I still feel that there are no words large enough to contain what is happening.
My beloved Venezuela,
These pages speak of the layers of horror that we, as Venezuelans, are living through today. But those of us who truly know you, know that you are so much more than this tragedy. Your land is a place of breathtaking abundance, where nature still feels vast, untamed, and almost magical. And your people possess an endless capacity to love, to reach out, and to rise from the ashes again and again.
That is the Venezuela that also exists.
And that is the Venezuela I will never stop recognizing.