[Natalie Kitroeff]: Last week, after two massive earthquakes struck Venezuela, my colleague Carlos Prieto started calling people there. Carlos is from Venezuela. He spent his childhood in the capital, Caracas. But when he started to see pictures and videos of the damage, he realized he couldn't even recognize parts of his hometown. So he asked people how it all started.

[Natasha Villa]: I was actually at my best friend's house, and I was going back to my house.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Natasha Villa was driving when the ground started to move.

[Natasha Villa]: I started feeling my car just sliding from side to side. I thought that it was the feeling of when you're driving on top of water. So you feel like the car is just sliding. You could see people screaming and running out of the street. You could see the light posts and the electrical posts falling down in the street and the people screaming while the electricity sparkles were just going everywhere.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: She had no idea how extensive the damage was.

[Natasha Villa]: I didn't have signal on my phone at all because the network had fallen completely.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: With power outages all over the country and phone lines collapsed,

[Natasha Villa]: there was no way to communicate with my friends.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: much of Venezuela didn't know either.

[Natasha Villa]: We had no idea what was happening. So, I waited for a friend who had a car, and we drove around the city trying to find signal.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Carlos Yelembi is a comedian. He was supposed to perform at a stand-up show that night.

[Carlos Yelembi]: So, yeah, once we found the signal, uh well, we

[Natalie Kitroeff]: When he finally got access to the internet, he couldn't believe what was coming up on his phone.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: What was the first thing that you saw?

[Carlos Yelembi]: The first thing I saw was like some uh buildings collapse, and uh we have some friends who live next to the first building that fell off in Caracas. Like, hey, our friend is alive, but uh probably a lot of people in the building next to him are not.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: And then, he saw more.

[Carlos Yelembi]: Then, as we checked the news, we saw, "Oh, okay, so that was not the only building that fell."

[Natalie Kitroeff]: He saw building after building collapse in Caracas, but nothing prepared him for what had happened in La Guaira, a state on the country's northern coast.

[Carlos Yelembi]: And then, we saw La Guaira videos, and it was too much.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: As more and more images trickled out, a horrific picture of ruin began to emerge. La Guaira's normally a popular vacation spot, but now entire blocks had turned to rubble. Thousands and thousands of people were looking for their loved ones.

[Carlos Yelembi]: The first thing I thought was, "The city is lost."

[Natasha Villa]: Um just today, I went over to the Domingo Luciani Hospital when where I saw with my own eyes the level of devastation. I saw trucks, pickup trucks carrying um patients directly from La Guaira. There was a 4-year-old girl that had her pelvis exposed that was arriving at the same time, and I was there.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Mhm.

[Natasha Villa]: There's no way to describe it.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Today, we look at how Venezuelans united after the earthquakes and talk to our colleague Anatoly Kurmanaev from La Guaira about how the aftermath of the tragedy has forced the Trump administration to shift its plans in Venezuela. It's Thursday, July 2nd.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: So, Anatoly, you got to Venezuela on Sunday, and you've been spending a lot of time in the part of the country most affected by these earthquakes, which is La Guaira. So, just tell me what you've seen.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: So, La Guaira is a gateway to Venezuela. It's this town outside of capital Caracas, and I've driven there hundreds of times.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: This is Anatoly. This is Monday afternoon, and I'm sitting in the back of a passenger car.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: Early this week, I made this drive again, and it was a very different drive this time.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: Ooh, wow, the line.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: There was a lot of traffic. There was a lot of people going down into the city. In front of me is a is a pickup truck loaded up with mattresses, motorbikes, and cars, trucks carrying supplies, carrying water.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: Just passed a motorbike driver with just a small bag full of groceries.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: It was quite an unusual sight, but apart from that, everything around you looked very much the same, the same as always.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: We're entering La Guaira.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: And it wasn't till you get into the city itself that you start to see widespread destruction.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: Wow. Yeah, this is the first high-rise that's badly damaged that's that I've seen.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: Blocks just entirely leveled.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: Wow, the walls are blown out. Gone, broken lifts, people's possessions just hanging out.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: And it's the seeming apparent randomness of it, right? That one block could be completely unscathed. Even even the glass and the paint is still there and then the next, you know, a few meters down the road is just completely leveled buildings.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: I'm standing on top of a collapsed building.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: And when you approached a destroyed building, the first thing that hits you is is the smell. The smell of rots, of the putrefication. Um it was just very clear smell of decayed flesh.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Wow.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: Dozens of people around me are digging through in various parts hoping to find someone.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: You know, I have been a foreign correspondent for many years and I've covered a lot of unrest. I have been around death, but I have never covered a natural disaster of this scale and I have never really thought about how death smells.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Mhm.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: And this was very much it. Like this was very clear to me that this is what death smells like.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: Sitting on the side of a collapsed large residential building.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: There were people digging through pretty much every collapsed building.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: A few relatives standing on the side of a road.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: They're very resigned.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: The off quake happened a few days before I arrived, so the chances of finding someone alive have faded a lot by the time I was there.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: It's a lone excavator digging through the rubble. It feels a bit chaotic. Like taking out a glass of sand from a beach.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: What do we know about the numbers, Anatoly, of of the dead and of the missing? Where does that stand right now?

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: So, the official death toll is around 2,000 people by now, and yesterday the government suggested that it could rise to about 10,000.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Wow.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: There are no reliable estimates of missing, but some, you know, the crowd-sourcing platforms put the number at about 50,000. We we should not say that too seriously. There's There's There's a lot of caveats here, you know, but I think it is not unlikely that the number of deaths will end up being in five digits.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Okay. So, really heavy, just a horrific scene. What is your understanding of how this happened? Of of what led to the scale of destruction and of death?

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: So, first of all, Natalie, these were very powerful earthquakes. I'm sure they had to be powerful that would have caused destruction in in many places around the world, if not most. This was twin earthquakes, a very unusual set of circumstances, and they also occurred during a public holiday.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Mhm.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: This was a like an unusually very busy time for the area that ended up suffering the most. So, widespread destruction and death was perhaps unavoidable. But, there are growing questions being asked whether decisions made by the government have contributed to the destruction. Many of the destroyed buildings or many of buildings that appear to have caused the most death have been social housing, which has been very rapidly built in the last 15-20 years to meet political objectives. They were basically built around election time to garner votes, and there's growing indications that corners were cut in building those buildings.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: This was under Nicolás Maduro, the previous president of Venezuela.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: This was under Nicolas Maduro, but this was primarily under his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, who won numerous elections by gaining the support of Venezuela's poor, of the Venezuela's majority. And his flagship project was something called Gran Misión Vivienda, the the grand housing project, which involved the constructions of thousands of buildings, thousands of social housing blocks around the country, uh which were then given out to Venezuela's poor. And many of these buildings have collapsed.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Hm. Okay, so there are questions over whether that strategy led by Chávez continued under Maduro may have created the conditions for this level of destruction.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: Yeah, I mean, you know, Venezuela has a history of heavy seismic activity. This is an earthquake-prone zone. This is not a secret. And statistical models have predicted a strong earthquake here for some years. This is a country that should have been prepared. And to be fair, many buildings have withstood uh the earthquake very well. Entire neighborhoods have sort of came out of this pretty much unscathed. So, there are construction engineering reasons coming from the decisions taken by Hugo Chávez and Nicolas Maduro. But there were also decisions taken by the country's current leader, Delcy Rodríguez, that have contributed to the in effect of this response.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Like what? What do you mean by that?

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: So, before Delcy Rodríguez became the leader of the government, she has been a long-term official of this regime. She has really risen in the ranks of the government under Nicolas Maduro, who made her his economic troubleshooter, giving her responsibility for the country's oil industry with the job of helping him stay in power. And she has orchestrated this great shift from the socialist principles that have powered the ruling movement since its foundation towards this laissez-faire hands-off economic approach.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: More of an open market.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: More of an open market and this is what it looks like in practice. Under Hugo Chávez, the state had lavished citizens with goods and services in return for political loyalties. There was free food, free housing, subsidized travel, and all sorts of social benefits for any aspect of your life you can imagine, for education, for your house pets, for the elderly, for university students, et cetera, et cetera. And this this was a time of economic plans in the country where oil prices were high, oil exports were earning the country billions and billions of dollars, and Hugo Chávez could afford that. Then the oil prices collapsed in 2014, American sanctions start strangling the country's economy, and this becomes no longer sustainable.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Mhm.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: And Delcy, as Nicolás Maduro's economic chief, makes the decision to retreat the state from people's lives. So, the Venezuelan state gradually stops providing basic services that uh they have for for many decades. Um the people are left on their own to fend for themselves. You know, in Russia we have a saying uh the survival of a drowning is the business of a drowning and and this is what what Delcy instituted.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: have the best sayings in Russia.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: Uh and in return, the government gave them some breathing space to do that. So, so it's uh it stopped harassing businesses, by and large it stopped the expropriations, it loosened currency control, it just made it easier for people to go about their daily lives, right? It's unleashed in a way market forces of supply and demand to try to fill in the gaps left by the retreating state. And and it did not, you know, create this massive bananas, it did not create a Dubai out of Caracas, but it did make people's lives significantly easier, you know? But there was a cost to that. There was a in a way a hidden cost because the retreat of the state meant that the state no longer was in charge of providing basic services like like telecommunications or even electricity in some cases, the state shrank, the state hollowed out. It was everyone was for themselves. And that was fine at the times of relative stability because people's entrepreneurship, private initiatives could help people get by. But when a natural disaster strikes and it requires a mass coordinated state response, the shortcomings of her policies became very much apparent.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: You're saying that under Chavez and then Maduro, obviously it was by no means perfect, but all of the resources were under the control of the government. And so if the government needed to move quickly to respond to something like a disaster, you'd imagine it could. And then the move under Delcy to a more open market system, it kind of splits these state functions up and they retreat from providing the services that you need when something like this happens.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: It's exactly what happened. And there's also a second reason. Maduro, especially in his last years in power as he became increasingly unpopular, he became increasingly paranoid. He was worried about coups, he was worried about rebellions, anything that could topple him from power. And he became very distrustful of his own government, people who could organize and and push him out from power. So he started atomizing Venezuelan state. and by this I mean he splits it into little fiefdoms controlled by different officials, you know, who enrich themselves and none of them are able to communicate with each other or organize with other and this makes it very difficult to organize a coup. But it also in circumstances like now makes it very difficult for all these different institutions, the police, the military, the civil protection services, the health care system, etc. to get together to coordinate and do something together. This is precisely what is needed during an earthquake and instead we just have all these small groups of people running around aimlessly because there is nothing that ties them together.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Okay, so basically both of these things, the economic shift and the political paranoia of Maduro lead to a very disorganized state. And then we get this other massive shift as we all know when the United States goes in under Trump and extracts Maduro earlier this year. Talk about that and how it affected what we're seeing now.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: This made things even more complicated because now it's not Delcy who ultimately made decisions in Venezuela. It is Washington. There is this Trump administration. So it adds a novel layer of decision-making, a novel layer of bureaucracy and complicates the chain of commands and this is not what you want during a disaster response.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Just explain what you mean when you say that it's the Trump administration making decisions.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: So Natalie, the strange thing about this is is basically exactly what it sounds like, you know, this is one of these rare things. This is not a metaphor. The US has direct control over Venezuela's public revenues. The US has massive influence over Venezuela's political systems, over its economic decisions. So, it is literally Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State, and his team that make everyday decisions how Venezuela is run and what happens in Venezuela, what stances it takes.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: That is just so wild, that setup. Totally unimaginable, even, you know, 6 months ago.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: Yeah, it was Natalie, it was definitely something I could not have imagined. You know, yesterday I was in La Guaira, and for part of the day I was in the airports, in the country's airport, which has been damaged. There's no commercial traffic, but there's a lot of aid supplies coming in there. And this is also where US military set up its base. So, it was this really bizarre scene that I witnessed of a senior Venezuelan security official, a man called Gran Ca Arteaga, who has been US nemesis, you know, he's a man accused of gross human rights violation, torture, killing of political opponents, and he has been sought by US governments for many years. And here he was, standing and calmly looking on US military helicopters taking on and off from an airport a few hundred yards in front of him. And it was it was just so surreal to see US military power, which has been, you know, the nemesis of of Venezuelan government for for decades for decades, just having complete free reign on Venezuelan airfield in front of him.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Okay, you're getting at this right now, but how does this new government structure in Venezuela and the partnership with the US affect the response to these quakes?

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: So, when the quakes hit, the government was caught completely flat-footed. It is unclear what's happening. And for the first 24 hours, which are the crucial hours, the hours where you most likely to find survivors, there's no organized response, or very little of organized response. We've seen very little heavy machinery on the streets. We've seen very little, you know, organized groups of civil servants. You know, there's sort of very sporadic statements from the government. And you know, people feel completely abandoned. People feel on their own. And they have no choice but to take matters into their own hands.

[Natasha Villa]: The first 24 hours of zero the earthquake that we started sending food directly to La Guaira. There were practically no rescue missions. There were no military on the street. There were no police officers. There was no help. There were so many places where the people were screaming from inside of the rubble. But there was absolutely nothing that they could do because there was no machinery. I know of a friend that she spent those 48 hours looking at the rubble where her father was buried. And there was no one there to help.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Everyone that our producer Carlos talked to, they couldn't sit still as all this was happening.

[Natasha Villa]: I went to the store and bought

[Natalie Kitroeff]: So they started either sending food or supplies down the stretch of highway to La Guaira, or going there themselves to help in any way they could.

[Natasha Villa]: Every day we wake up and went down to give it to the people that were working on the fall beam.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Often, they were the first people that survivors had seen.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: I'm curious if there has been a moment where you've noticed that maybe you are the first person that someone there has seen come for help.

[Natasha Villa]: Many. Many times. Um So many families have suffered. So many people have had many days without talking to their families. So many people have lost everything. And um They were just happy to be alive. To save maybe one of their kids.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: What have they told you? When they see you?

[Natasha Villa]: It's amazing to maybe talk with some someone for less than 5 minutes. And when you're going to say goodbye, you say goodbye with a hug. Like it just feels so grateful.

[Carlos Yelembi]: A lot of people from abroad uh uh started messaging me asking me to reach their families. Like the the mom of one of our friends in Argentina was missing. He started like asking, "Hey, if you know any info about my mom, please let us know."

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Carlos, the comedian, got multiple calls from people begging him to help locate their loved ones. Two friends had the same plea. Could he help them find their mothers who'd gone missing in La Guaira?

[Carlos Yelembi]: So, we went on two motorcycles.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: So, Carlos and a few friends got on their motorcycles and headed toward the worst of the earthquake.

[Carlos Yelembi]: To try to find two moms. So, we tried to reach for the first mom, but when we actually reached the building and the building was completely collapsed.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Do you think that she didn't make it?

[Carlos Yelembi]: Yeah, I would say so. I would say it's the the most probable case. And like the person like she kind of knows it. Like she kind of knows it that it's a long shot. So, yeah. But when we reach these places like the people told us, "Hey, nobody's coming here." And we see that there is nobody around. Like most civilians helping in those places are the civilians that live in those places.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: So, Anatoly, in the last few days our colleague daily producer Carlos Prieto has been talking to people who are doing just what you said, actively jumping in as volunteers with no experience, just mounting their own pretty incredible rescue efforts. Just talk to me high-level about that civilian effort. What is the scale and scope of it?

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: Natalie, it's nothing short of remarkable and simply overwhelming. We cannot call it a silver lining given the scale of a human tragedy, but to see every single men and women you meet contributing something, jumping in has literally brought like tears to my eyes, you know, it's the the universality of this effort, the rich, the poor, just all cooking food, delivering supplies, donating, you know, opening up their houses, providing transport, digging through the rubble. It's been remarkable. And you know, Natalie, like we have been foreign correspondents for many years. We have covered a lot of authoritarian governments and and the rulebook of all these autocrats is to atomize society.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Totally.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: To divide the society, to turn it into this isolated pockets that are unable to stand together, unable of to do any collective action, including changing the government, right? This is how Putin works. This is how Maduro works. And this is a government that has been in power for almost 20 years and it has systematically undermined people's ability to make their voice count. And the way people here have responded, the way they have come together to do something meaningful has been just absolutely overwhelming.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: You're saying basically that strategy didn't work because here people are gathering in this way.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: The strategy didn't work and you know, obviously it's a testament to the will of its own people. But at the end of the day, these are just regular people facing a massive catastrophe and they are putting band-aids at a massive problem that will not be solved without organized state involvement.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: And once that organized state involvement comes, I assume it does start to materialize at some point, what did it look like?

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: Well, it is beginning to materialize, Natalie. You know, the financial aid is flowing in supplies are flowing in. There's growing number of international volunteers, servicemen who are helping out. There's there's talk of multilateral organizations providing loans, providing financing. And by this stage, Natalie, we are no longer really talking about search and rescue, by and large. We're talking longer-term reconstruction.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: And what about the partnership, this now very close collaboration with the United States? Did that help?

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: It did. It absolutely did. I think it's would be fair to say that for all the questions that exist about US-Venezuelan relationship today, questions that have to do with morality, national sovereignty, international law, it is very clear that without US involvement, the situation on the ground would have been even worse. It has flown in a lot of supplies. It's logistical muscles, the use of transport, helicopters, etc., has been very important. Today, there are already 900 American soldiers on the ground in Venezuela and helping the recovery efforts. The US has already committed 300 million dollars of aid to Venezuela. US is pushing to reintegrate Venezuela into international organizations that can provide long-term lending. So, there's absolutely questions about whether the US could do more, but in absolute terms, its response has been significant.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: And that significant response, I'd imagine, has the Trump administration deepening its connection to the current government, right?

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: Absolutely. My my reporting shows that after the earthquake, the US has communicated to Delcy Rodriguez that they are all in, that they have made a bet on her, they have made a bet on this alliance, and they are going to lean into it. US officials have lavished praise on Delcy and, you know, her response repeatedly in public statements. Just yesterday, the US government said in a statement that Venezuelan government has agreed to all of their requests that they had after the earthquake, which is very interesting because it implies that the decisions are made by the US government and it's Venezuela and so we just approve the decisions that have already been taken. One of the perhaps unexpected consequences of this earthquake is this alliance has become a lot deeper in the last few days.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: And what are the implications of that?

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: This matters because the US is working with a government that they themselves have labeled as illegitimate. They have labeled it as sponsors of what they call narco-terrorism, a government that has stolen elections. And until the earthquake, the US plan as articulated repeatedly by Senator Marco Rubio involved three stages. First, the recovery of Venezuelan economy, stabilization of its political system, and transition, which means political transitions basically enabling free elections. And after the earthquake, Rubio himself admits that the catastrophe complicates this plan, makes it more difficult. This is something that they didn't plan for, this is something they could not have planned for. And in practical terms, the considerations makes it harder to imagine free elections in any foreseeable future. Makes it difficult to imagine Venezuela is really recovering their democracy and recovering their political voice.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Okay, so I have to ask, what is the Venezuelan opposition saying about this post-earthquake phase where maybe elections are being kicked even further down the road?

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: So the earthquakes have put the forces opposed to the government of Diosdado Cabello Rodriguez in a very difficult position. They're in a lose-lose situation because on the one hand, if they stand aside, they are basically watching the US deepening their alliance with their sworn enemies and pushing the can of elections down the road. At the same time, if they use the earthquake as an opportunity to reinsert themselves into Venezuela's political lives. They face accusations of opportunism, politization of disaster, and of basically staging political stunts. And this dilemma is particularly acute for the leader of Venezuela opposition, Maria Corina Machado, Nobel Peace Prize laureate. She remains the most popular politicians in the country. She's a person who would undoubtedly win elections if they were held tomorrow. But she's in exile. She left Venezuela last year to receive a prize, and she has been unable to come back since. So, she is now watching from outside the country as the US makes their bet with Delcy Rodriguez. And frankly, you know, as a Venezuelan person, she's watching with tremendous suffering of her citizens, and naturally she wants to be involved. She wants to help. And she has been trying to come back. She does not have a valid passport. Her Venezuelan passport has expired. So, she needs US help to get into the country. And she has been making increasingly forceful public pleas to aid her return.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: to the US, "Help me get back in there. I want to help."

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: That's exactly what she's been saying. Uh and her pleas to the US have massively backfired because the US administrations, they see her as a destruction. They have moved from privately expressing annoyance or her pleas to now publicly saying that her campaign to return to the country is a political stunt because they say, "We remain focused on reconstruction. We remain focused on aids." And the US government for now has bought into the arguments of Venezuelan government that allowing the opposition back into the country would just stoke social tensions, could create violence, could create unrest, and this is not something that US government wants to see in Venezuela right now.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: So, the long and short of it is that this tragedy obviously has very high political stakes on all sides. The opposition wants to use this as an opportunity to assert itself. For Delcy Rodriguez, this is a chance to solidify its ties with the US even more and to presumably try to show that she's a competent leader in the worst of times. But also for the United States, this feels like an important moment. I mean, President Trump has touted what he's done in Venezuela as this huge win. He's based a lot of his foreign policy on what he sees as his success there. And here is this event that maybe putting that idea to the test.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: Winston Churchill once said, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." And there's so much at stake for everyone involved. For Delcy Rodriguez, either this crisis ends up tumbling her government or she ends up establishing her legitimacy, ends up establishing herself as the powerful ruler of Venezuela. For the opposition, either they reinsert themselves into Venezuelan political life and use the discontent with government response to take power or they fade into obscurity in exile. And for the Trump administration, this is a crucial test of the narrative that the Venezuelan operation has been an unfettered success, that this has been the biggest foreign policy achievement of Trump's second term. He has repeatedly said that Venezuela has now become a very happy country, but Venezuelans are dancing on the street. And the reality is that today Venezuelans are not dancing on the streets. Many of them are living on the streets, right? The images that are coming out of the country clash massively with the way that he has painted this relationship, right? So, he now has to take action to create what he has been talking about, right? He now has to take ownership in a way for the situation in Venezuela. And what will happen in Venezuela in the next few months and years to a great extent will depend on the decisions that he will make in the coming weeks.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: What about for Venezuelans? I have to think that the stakes for them are much more urgent, life or death. Like the question is whether they can feel safe living in this country, under this system, given the response to this tragedy.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: This tragedy has released a great amount of pain and suffering, but it has also made Venezuelans rediscover their voice and given them bravery to speak out. In La Guaira, you see residents coming together to express their anger at government officials, to chase them out, to boo them. Um, there's a sense of confidence and at the same time a sense of anger and rage. And it's anger at being abandoned by the government at this moment of great needs and at the corruption and incompetence that we see in all around them. But it's a trigger for the pain that they have experienced for the last 20 years living under this government, right? This is sort of like a cathartic moment in a way, right? But everything has been bubbling up inside Venezuelan people for so many years that they have been afraid to say because of repression, because of lack of independent media. This is all now coming out. So, perhaps the greatest paradox of what we see in Venezuela right now is that while the material conditions for elections and democracy are moving further away, people in power have more and more reasons to just kick the can down the road. The desire for democracy, the desire for political voice has risen dramatically. People really want it. People are no longer willing to wait for it. And I also think what we see now is Venezuelans rediscovering that they are not alone, that they're part of a larger community. And I think, you know, this earthquake will have big consequences for Venezuelan society, for Venezuelan people as a whole, because they have seen the power of their collective action and what they can do together despite all the challenges.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Well, Anatoly, thank you so much.

[Anatoly Kurmanaev]: Thanks, as always.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: So, when you think about that mom, the first mom that you couldn't find, were you were you afraid that you also might not find this other mom?

[Carlos Yelembi]: Oh, of course. But, as we reached the place, we went to the bus stop that is closest to the house where she was seen. And we have no signal, we have no way of knowing and like the actual street because it goes up like to the slums. So, we asked somebody at this bus stop like, "Hey, where is this street?" And they told us, "Oh, it's right here. Who are you looking for?" And we say her name and the man we asked tells us, "Well, yes, I'm her brother."

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Oh, wow.

[Carlos Yelembi]: Yeah. It was uh yeah, uh like too work. Like yes, of course I'm her brother. Do you want to come and visit her? And we were like, yes, please. We have to send a video to our friend. And he took us to the home and she was there.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: And she's okay?

[Carlos Yelembi]: She's okay, yeah. She's she's okay. There was just like no way to communicating, but yeah. She's okay.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: On Wednesday, a team at the University of Minnesota announced that it had taken a major step toward achieving something that scientists have long dreamed of, discovering how chemicals can be turned into life. The researchers blended together dozens of ingredients and synthesized simple cells that can feed, grow, and reproduce, passing along their genetic material to future generations. While those cells may not technically be fully alive, they have most of the basic components necessary for life. Scientists hope that synthetic cells may someday be engineered to do things that natural cells can't, like making new kinds of medicine or drawing large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The biologist leading the team called her creation Spud cell because of its potato-like appearance.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: Today's episode was produced by Carlos Prieto, Lindsay Garrison, Anna Foley, Chris Benderev, and Eric Krupke. It was edited by Michael Benoit and Chris Hacksel and contains music by Marion Lozano, Elisheba Ittup, Dan Powell, Rowan Nemi, and Pat McCusker. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Chris Wood.

[Natalie Kitroeff]: That's it for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kitroeff. See you tomorrow.