‘There will have to be a reckoning’: Venezuela’s natural disaster meets a collapsing infrastructure

Venezuela's earthquake exposed far more than geological fault lines—it revealed structural decay that runs decades deep. According to Christopher Sabatini, a researcher at Chatham House, the disaster's true scale reflects not just natural forces, but twenty-seven years of state erosion, corruption, and economic mismanagement that left the country unable to respond effectively. The interim government faces immediate scrutiny over its response, but Sabatini argues the roots go much deeper: a cumulative collapse of rule of law and governance that made the nation fundamentally vulnerable. 'There will have to be a reckoning,' Sabatini says—not just with the earthquake, but with the institutional failures that transformed a natural disaster into a catastrophe.

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