A revolution in ruins: fury amid the rubble of a housing project in quake-hit Venezuela

Military personnel, search and rescue teams and volunteers work through the rubble of the OPPE 25 housing project In La Guaira. Photograph: Manu Quintero/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Military personnel, search and rescue teams and volunteers work through the rubble of the OPPE 25 housing project In La Guaira. Photograph: Manu Quintero/The Guardian A revolution in ruins: fury amid the rubble of a housing project in quake-hit Venezuela Discontent with Trump-backed government mounts as Chávez heirs struggle to respond to disaster for which they seem ill-prepared Even before two powerful earthquakes reduced the OPPE 25 government housing project to an anarchy of shattered concrete and broken lives, the foundations of Hugo Chávez’s populist “Bolivarian” revolution were shaking in what was once a hotbed of support. Gabriel González remembers his elation when, in 2013, he received the keys to his freshly completed apartment in one of the 12-floor tower blocks El Comandante had ordered to be built in an affluent corner of the resort town of Caraballeda. View image in fullscreen Gabriel González, a 45-year-old construction worker who lived in OPPE 25, is still looking for his son, Daniel, at the improvised refugee camp at a golf course in La Guaira. The 45-year-old construction worker lost his home during deadly mudslides and spent two years in an emergency shelter before receiving his new home near the beach. “It was wonderful,” recalled González, for years a proud supporter of Chávez’s socialist party, the PSUV. “The Chávez government helped the poor so much … Back then, everyone was on Chávez’s side.” But shortly after González moved into OPPE 25, Chávez died , and in the years that followed, the builder said his feelings – and those of many neighbours – began to sour. Years of poverty, mass migration, hyperinflation and authoritarian rule under Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, fuelled widespread discontent. “Everyone around here said the Bolivarian revolution … was no more – that it was no longer the same,” said González, whose siblings fled to the US and Brazil. “Unfortunately, what happened is that it became a dictatorship.” View image in fullscreen A image of the former president Nicolás Maduro on an ambulance next to a collapsed building in La Guaira. Then came last month’s twin earthquakes, which devastated Venezuela’s north coast and revealed a revolution in ruins as Chávez’s heirs struggled to respond to a catastrophe for which they seemed woefully ill-prepared. “We don’t have a government,” González complained one recent morning as he stood by the donated tent where he sleeps on a golf course near his obliterated home. Two weeks after the disaster, González’s 22-year-old son, Daniel, and mother-in-law, Esmeralda, are still missing. His family squats by the wreckage as they wait for news. Like many residents of La Guaira, the northern state worst hit by the disaster, González criticised the sluggish reaction of Venezuela’s acting le