Nearly five months after the magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 earthquakes that occurred on June 24, 2026, the business sector, professional guilds, and academic institutions remain unaware of the contents of the official reconstruction project for Vargas state, despite announcements from the interim government about the Venezuela Renace plan.
Architect Mario Lieghio, president of the Vargas state Chamber of Construction and co-founder of the Earthquake Survivors Network, warned in an interview with Efecto Cocuyo that the lack of official information and the centralized handling of the emergency make it impossible to know the real costs of the works, the companies hired, and the destination of the funds.
For the guild representative, if the Executive attempts to carry out the work in isolation without listening to the specialists and residents who know the territory, the land where buildings collapsed will end up occupied by spontaneous settlements and private investors will withdraw their capital to other regions within two to three years.
"We don't have infinite time if, from the government sector, hand in hand with the private sector, major planning and development in the region does not begin. The State does not have the conditions to carry out this reconstruction alone, and the great risk we face is turning this into a kind of ghost town," Lieghio warned.
**The umbrella of the emergency and the official silence**
Lieghio points out that the indefinite extension of the state of emergency decree after the earthquake functions as a mechanism that shields the lack of accountability over the use of public funds, a scheme he compares to what happened after the 1999 landslide. The architect questions that trucks and machinery operate on the streets of the central coast moving earth and debris without there being a public, itemized technical study from a government institution justifying the budget allocations, nor informational signs identifying the responsible engineers, the amounts assigned, or the execution timelines.
"That umbrella implied by the emergency generates opacity so that people don't know. How many machines are here? Who pays for the machines and how much is that costing? How many workers and companies are from Vargas, and what will be the objective of all that debris? People should know the answers to all these questions," the spokesperson questioned.
The information reserve is maintained at all levels of the public administration. Although the legal competencies for urban planning fall to the mayor's office, Lieghio indicated that control of post-earthquake operations has remained concentrated in the national authorities, with minimal participation from the regional and municipal governments.
The Survivors Network sent formal requests for hearings to the municipal, regional, and national offices to cross-reference the technical diagnoses compiled by the private sector with state data, but as of the afternoon of this Tuesday, November 10, no official body has responded.
The only operational data on the fieldwork was obtained in a meeting with Japanese engineer Kit Miyamoto, representative of the international firm in charge of disaster response, who informed them that his company's commitment is limited to the surveying and processing of between three and four million tons of debris left by the landslides, without participation in the design or the urban reconstruction phase, for the moment.
**Up to 21 billion dollars to recover the country**
The transparency demands of the Guaireño guilds occur in the face of a multibillion-dollar gap between the estimated cost of the damage and the resources available in the country. According to the Post-Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA), delivered at the Palacio de Miraflores by the director for Latin America and the Caribbean of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Michelle Muschett, to interim president Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela requires up to 21 billion dollars for its recovery, a figure that includes measures to rebuild and reduce risk conditions.
The study, prepared together with the European Union, the World Bank, and with technical support from CAF and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), determined that the two earthquakes caused damage and losses of 14,831 million dollars in the seven affected states: Vargas, Caracas, Miranda, Aragua, Carabobo, and Yaracuy. In a prior satellite assessment of 1.7 million structures and power supply outages in La Guaira, Caracas, Aragua, and Carabobo, the UNDP had calculated direct physical damage at around 6,700 million dollars, with a range between 4,700 and 8,700 million dollars, equivalent to about 6% of the national Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Faced with these figures, the announced funds barely cover a fraction of the emergency. Rodríguez reported the mobilization of 200 million dollars allocated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and 17 million dollars contributed by the government of China; the United States committed more than 300 million dollars in direct humanitarian assistance, and the UN Central Emergency Response Fund released 15 million dollars.
**Five technical steps against improvisation**
In the absence of government guidelines, days after the earthquakes an alliance was formed in La Guaira made up of the regional and national construction and real estate chambers, the College of Engineers, the National Academy of Engineering and Habitat, architecture and engineering faculties of national universities, and the vice president of the Chamber of Deputies for the state, and they designed a five-point roadmap to guide the reconstruction of the state.
The first step proposes setting a deadline for the state of emergency to make contracts and costs transparent. The second consists of creating a comprehensive risk map, whose seismic microzonification is in charge of specialist Michael Schmitz along with private groups and the College of Engineers, which evaluates the affected institutions, capable of crossing seismic threats with the water risk of the ravines, vulnerability to tsunamis, and the danger of forest fires or fires in the port and airport axis.
The third step incorporates the Survivors Network to connect the academics' decisions with the needs of the residents; the fourth contemplates drafting a strategic plan that reorders both the physical space and the governance model through decentralization and the study of how many municipalities the state really requires; and the fifth step culminates in a master plan for the urban development of the city and the state.
During these nearly five months, the guilds and professionals have advanced on their own in seismic microzonification studies, the compilation of the regional cadastre, and the updating of the population census, in addition to holding meetings with representatives of CAF and international organizations conducting diagnoses in the area.
The preliminary criteria held by the engineers suggest concentrating settlement toward areas near the mountain, where the soil presents greater solidity, and reducing the height of buildings in the coastal strip.
**Port, airport, and long-term consensus**
The private sector's technical proposal aims to transform La Guaira into a tourist hub without abandoning its commercial operations, relying on the modernization of its two main terminals. In the case of the port, specialists propose adding cruise ship arrivals and tourist activities to the traditional cargo handling.
Regarding the Maiquetía international airport, technical reports point to the urgency of doubling its operational capacity and connecting it through direct north-south and east-west road links, in order to handle the flow of travelers that the eight million Venezuelans abroad will generate as the country normalizes.
"That gigantic transit, as the country's condition normalizes, will keep growing and we need physical infrastructure of a great effort. The airport right now doesn't have the capacity, not even when it's repaired," Lieghio explained.
According to estimates by the experts advising the Chamber of Construction, completing the technical planning phase will take between six and twelve months, while the execution of the works will span several government periods. Therefore, Lieghio insists that the reconstruction cannot be politicized or depend on a single administration, which is why they are willing to present their studies both to the authorities in office and to any political leadership that assumes power in a possible transition.
To avoid a repeat of the citizen exclusion recorded in the 1999 reconstruction project, in which urban planner Carlos Genatios, today a member of the advisory team, participated, the Survivors Network will set up in the coming days thematic working tables on urban planning, education, security, the port, the airport, mobility, and public, private, and cargo transportation, with the aim of consulting everyone from beach workers to residents of sectors with different realities such as Carayaca or the coast.
"A city is not built in four years; there has to be a minimum agreement among the government, the private sector, the merchants, the beach workers, and the community as a whole that establishes what the path is. To the extent that people know what is going to be done and are protagonists, they will defend it and will not allow the opacity of the past to be present today," the architect concluded.