(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Los criminales o el terremoto añadido)

The images say it all. Two days after the two devastating earthquakes in northern Venezuela, in La Guaira, in Caracas, and in other affected towns, Venezuelan men, women, and children try, with ever less hope, to pull survivors from under the rubble. And they do it with their bare hands. When night falls they carry on amid screams of desperation and sobbing, lit by the light of their mobile phones. No excavators, no cranes, no heavy machinery of any kind, no rescue teams, no official coordination of any sort. Alone before their misfortune, in their infinite pain, they cry out for help, because time is running out along with the lives of their loved ones. And they all fear that the help that arrives from abroad — because from within they expect little or nothing — will arrive too late for them.

There is no starker or more brutal image of the helplessness of a people who are now victims of a terrifying apotheosis of the pain that has tortured them for a quarter of a century already. Yes, that Eden that is Venezuela, that most beautiful piece of America, which treasures every imaginable gift of nature, now receives the monstrous final punishment after a long and cruel torture. Nothing more resembles a biblical plague than these earthquakes, as fate’s terrible contribution to the man-made catastrophe that is the Venezuela governed by crime and for crime by criminals without scruples or limits such as Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, and Delcy Rodríguez.

Crime has stolen everything, has perverted, profaned, degraded, and destroyed everything. So much so that a country sitting atop the largest oil reserves in the world, and that was once the richest on the continent, has no excavators or cranes, nor even shovels or picks, flashlights, floodlights, or anyone to distribute them. From Spain it is hard not to see and feel that nightmarish parallel that shows Spaniards the final stations along these roads of terror toward catastrophe, when the fatal forces of nature already join with the rot of the continued exercise of evil, vileness, and crime from power. Contempt for the interests of citizens degraded to subjects leads to indifference toward their very lives. It has been seen in the floods in Valencia, in Adamuz, in the blackout, and it shows in the Spanish socialist government, a fine emulator of Chavismo that it is.

Listening to murderers like Delcy Rodríguez or Diosdado Cabello give their harangues and official propaganda about their rescue deployment produces the logical revulsion, along with serious fears added to the mourning, that the criminal gang might exploit the tragedy for its own benefit. That by capitalizing on foreign aid it might entrench itself and successfully position itself before Washington in order to thwart the changes that the population is hoping for. These are essential for Venezuela’s reconstruction after its permanent 26-year earthquake, and for its moral recovery, both of which require the liquidation of the power of the gang of murderers, torturers, and thieves that the United States still keeps in place and whose foremost representative is Delcy Rodríguez.

But the effects of a social shock as immense as this tragedy are unpredictable. Just as it is already clear that Delcy Rodríguez smells the opportunity to strengthen and stabilize her power, which will never be anything but criminal, it is worth recalling that the 1972 Managua earthquake — smaller in magnitude than these but one that wiped the Nicaraguan capital off the map and caused nearly 20,000 deaths — was also the trigger for the fall of Anastasio Somoza’s regime, through the then thoroughly cross-cutting national uprising generated by the misappropriation of international aid and the inability to help those affected.

It is clear that criminals have their own way of governing, because they conceive of power as the capacity for abuse. That is just as clear today in Pedro Sánchez’s Spain as in the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, and Delcy Rodríguez. Right now the Venezuelan people urgently need help, first to save the lives that can still be saved and to ease the boundless pain flooding the country. But it must also be clear that after the earthquake, even more than before, Venezuela needs leaders who are not stained with blood. And the current leadership is stained with blood up to the crown of Delcy’s greasy black hair, not only because of the many hundreds of thousands murdered, disappeared, or tortured. But also because many of those the earthquake has claimed would still be alive if this regime, instead of stealing, stealing, and stealing, had fulfilled its obligation to govern and to provide Venezuelans with services and resources. Just as in Spain, where the kleptocracy imposed by the government of organized crime is already responsible for many tragedies and many deaths, in Venezuela the regime has had many ways of killing and torturing. Allowing Venezuelans to die of their wounds or of thirst while they hear their desperate relatives just a few meters above them digging through the rubble with their bare hands is one more of them.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.