After the ground stopped shaking, Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, went on state television not to mourn the dead or rally the living, but to accuse her opponents of running “media laboratories” to turn grief into unrest. And she issued a sinister warning: “there will be no social uprising here”. It was a revealing reflex – the language of rulers contemplating not the rubble, but the political ground beneath it. She was right to be wary as Latin American experiences of disasters are known to shift political trajectories.  But rarely in the simple way of protest slogans.

It is tempting to hope that big disasters may topple bad governments. They mostly do not, at least not directly. Mexico’s devastating 1985 earthquake did not start a revolution; the ruling party clung on for another fifteen years. What disasters do is subtler and, for unelected or fragile governments, more dangerous. Because a major catastrophe constitutes a “critical juncture” obliging a state to reveal, before its whole population and in real time, what it is actually capable of doing and whom it actually serves. It converts the abstract question of legitimacy into a visible, unforgiving performance test. What follows next depends on how it scores.

The historical record offers two opposing scripts with Venezuela containing ingredients of both. The first is de-legitimisation, and its archetypical example is Managua, 1972. When an earthquake flattened Nicaragua’s capital,  Somoza’s regime survived the tremor but not  what it exposed. It treated international relief as a private business opportunity and the sight of an entrenched elite feeding on a national tragedy united ordinary citizens and  communities against them.  That set in train the revolution that ended his dynasty seven years later.

Mexico City (1985) is the gentler variant: when the state’s earthquake response proved slow and uncertain, ordinary citizens dug their neighbours from the ruins. That civic awakening seeded an opposition that eventually broke one-party rule. The pattern is consistent:........

© E-International