Venezuela is burning, and I’m forced to watch from afar

Global Voices published a first-person essay from a Venezuelan asylum seeker in Mexico City, describing what it was like to watch her home country's earthquake disaster unfold through her phone screen. On June 24th, two earthquakes struck fewer than thirty-nine seconds apart, hitting Caracas and the coastal city of La Guaira during San Juan, a widely celebrated Afro-Catholic festival. The writer, who cannot leave Mexico while her asylum case is pending, says buildings collapsed and residents dug through rubble with their bare hands, while she accuses the government of turning away volunteers and seizing aid donations meant for survivors. As Global Voices notes, roughly eight million Venezuelans now live scattered across the diaspora, many of them, like her, watching the catastrophe unfold from afar with no way to go home.

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