A devastating pair of earthquakes has killed at least 4,734 people in Venezuela, injured more than 16,700 and displaced nearly 21,000 others, making it one of the deadliest seismic events in Latin American history. The twin quakes — measuring magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 — struck just 39 seconds apart on 24 June, a rare phenomenon known as a seismic doublet, causing catastrophic damage across the northern state of La Guaira and the capital, Caracas. The United Nations estimates that up to 50,000 people may be unaccounted for, a figure the Venezuelan government has largely avoided addressing publicly. More than 800 buildings were affected, 190 of which collapsed entirely. The UN has called for $300 million in humanitarian aid and estimates that 1.3 million Venezuelans now require assistance.

The scale of the disaster reflects a combination of geological bad luck and decades of institutional decay. The quakes originated along the San Sebastián fault, which runs just offshore along Venezuela's northern coast and marks the diffuse boundary between the Caribbean and South American tectonic plates. The two plates grind horizontally against each other, building pressure over roughly a century before releasing it — which is what appears to have happened on 24 June. Both were shallow-focused earthquakes, at depths of just 20 and 12 kilometres respectively, meaning their energy reached the surface with little dissipation. La Guaira sits on fluvial cones — loose, river-deposited sediments that amplify seismic waves rather than absorbing them — and much of the city had been identified as high-risk in hazard surveys conducted after a deadly 1999 landslide disaster in the same region. Experts say the destruction was worsened by years of deferred building maintenance, ageing infrastructure, and chronic underinvestment in seismic monitoring and civil protection services, themselves casualties of Venezuela's prolonged economic collapse since 2014, which has also driven the emigration of nine million people and left hospitals short of medicines, staff, and basic supplies.

Questions about the quality of government-built social housing have added a political dimension to the tragedy. Investigations by the Venezuelan outlet Armando.info had previously documented allegations of corruption, poor construction practices, and weak oversight in public housing projects developed over the past two decades. Several such developments in La Guaira collapsed in the quakes. Nicolás Maduro Guerra, a congressman and son of the imprisoned former president Nicolás Maduro, visited one affected housing estate and acknowledged he could not say whether the buildings had been constructed to proper standards, telling a journalist: