A Quake Back Home, and the Long Road to Helping From Here

On June 24, two enormous earthquakes struck Venezuela seconds apart. The U.S. Geological Survey recorded a magnitude 7.2 followed about 39 seconds later by a magnitude 7.5, centered near San Felipe, roughly 100 miles west of Caracas. It was the strongest quake to hit the country since at least 1900. As of late last week, news agencies put the toll above 1,400 dead, more than 3,000 injured, and tens of thousands reported missing, and those numbers were still climbing.

For a lot of families in our part of Texas, that is not a faraway headline. Greater Houston's Venezuelan population more than tripled over the last decade and now runs past 50,000, the fastest-growing Hispanic group in the metro, according to Pew Research and the Migration Policy Institute. The Katy area alone holds an estimated 15,000, enough that people there call it "Katy-zuela." Montgomery County and Magnolia sit inside that same growth. There is no published count for our specific corner of it, but the community is here, and it has relatives under the rubble.

So people are doing what diaspora communities always do first. They are collecting. In Katy, a donation drive run out of a Venezuelan restaurant, La Mora, has been gathering diapers, clothing, and medicine, organized by residents Dana Jimenez and Yegni Carruyo, ABC13 reported. A diaspora nonprofit, the We Love Foundation, has launched an emergency campaign and is working with Global Empowerment Mission, a relief group the U.S. State Department named as a partner in coordinating aid for the quake.

Here is where it gets harder.

Getting help into Venezuela is not as simple as filling a box. Relief experts and the State Department itself are urging people to give cash to vetted organizations rather than ship physical goods, because supplies face a gauntlet of transport, customs, and government control on the way in. U.S. sanctions complicate moving money and paying aid workers through banks. And on the ground, the government's own response has drawn sharp criticism. NPR reported that a former head of Venezuela's civil defense agency openly asked why the armed forces were "a no-show" at the worst quake in the country's history, while residents said officials "took selfies before leaving."

Some in the local community go further. They worry the aid they send will not reach earthquake victims at all, that a government with a record of controlling who eats will control who gets relief. That fear is not paranoia, and it is not confirmed fact either, so it is worth being precise. There is, as of this writing, no verified reporting that Venezuela's government is seizing the diaspora's earthquake supplies. What is documented, thoroughly, is the history that makes people braced for it. In 2019, the government physically blockaded a border bridge to stop aid trucks from Colombia; some of those trucks burned. For years, its CLAP food-box program was used as a political tool, handed to supporters and withheld from critics, a pattern flagged by Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, and the U.S. Treasury. People who lived through that are not wrong to ask hard questions about where a shipment ends up.

One more correction worth making, because names matter. The man most Americans associate with that record, Nicolás Maduro, is no longer in charge. He was captured by the United States in January, and Delcy Rodríguez, a longtime figure in the same governing movement, was sworn in as acting president. The government changed hands. The questions about how it handles aid did not.

For neighbors here who want to help and want it to land, the advice from the people coordinating relief is consistent: give money to a vetted organization rather than mail goods, and ask the group directly how it moves aid past the bottlenecks. The We Love Foundation and Global Empowerment Mission are two names in current reporting. The instinct to send something is the right one. Pointing it at a channel that can actually deliver is how it becomes help instead of hope.

Editor's note on format — We ran this as straight reporting rather than a two-view piece. The earthquake, the region's Venezuelan population, and the documented history of aid being politicized are matters of record. The concern that relief will be diverted is presented as what it is: a community fear, grounded in that documented history, not a confirmed account of the current disaster. We did not name local residents who did not choose to be public.