Depremler Trump'ın Venezuela Planını Nasıl Altüst Etti?

The earthquake sprung Trump's Venezuela trap

When the Trump administration decided to "run" Venezuela through Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, the aim was to keep things quiet following its January 3 raid to snatch the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro. Stability, oil, no messy transition, no open-ended commitment. The June 24 earthquakes have turned that calculation on its head. The United States now finds itself tied to a government that cannot deliver, in a country that needs years of reconstruction, facing exactly the long-term entanglement the January arrangement was designed to avoid. The deal made sense to both parties because each got something it badly wanted. Trump got a foreign policy win he could point to and a claim on Venezuelan oil, which he described as "our oil." Rodríguez got resources, sanctions relief, and the legitimacy that comes from visible U.S. backing.Trump needed Rodríguez to make the story of a successful intervention hold together. Rodríguez needed Trump to stay in power. The earthquakes have revealed how fragile such an arrangement can be. You can see how much the administration has riding on its relationship with Delcy in the way the president talks about Venezuela. The day before the quakes, Trump said Venezuelans were "happy in the country" with “smiles” on their faces, insisting they were sharing in the economic rewards of the new arrangement. That claim did not match the reality even then. Francisco Rodríguez of the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research found that Venezuela's economy grew at an annualized 2.5% in the first quarter, the weakest in years, even as oil exports jumped 25%. His read of the Central Bank data is that Washington has been keeping a chunk of the oil money rather than sending it to Caracas. So, the promised recovery had not reached ordinary Venezuelans even before the earthquakes; yet the president was out there telling the world they are thrilled. When the buildings came down, the government the United States has supported had few resources to respond. Neighbors dug through rubble with their bare hands, resorting to garbage bags because body bags weren’t available, while the armed forces stayed largely out of sight for two days. When military finally deployed in numbers, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello justified the militarization as necessary to maintain order, move ambulances and heavy machinery, and prevent congestion from volunteers pouring in, a revealing hierarchy of priorities for what was supposed to be a rescue operation. Phil Gunson, the Caracas-based analyst of the International Crisis Group, put it bluntly: Venezuela has "the worst of both worlds" – an authoritarian state without even the authoritarian competence to run a crisis. None of this would have surprised anyone who has watched the place for years. But it apparently surprised the Trump administration. In a July 1 State Department briefing, one week after the quakes, the U.S. chargé d'affaires in Caracas, John Barrett, offered as a reason for confidence that the earthquake "did not impact the country's oil and gas sector," so production continues, and the revenues keep flowing into the specialized accounts controlled by U.S. Treasury. With thousands dead and many more missing, the U.S. mission wanted the world to know that the crude was fine. The administration wants to minimize its financial and security exposure, keep the oil flowing, and avoid getting pulled into a reconstruction it never signed up for. Direct physical damage from the earthquakes is estimated at about $6.7 billion, close to 6% of Venezuela's GDP. Against that, the State Department says the U.S. financial commitment now tops $386 million, delivered through agencies such as Catholic Relief Services, UNICEF, and the World Food Program, with more than 400 metric tons of supplies moved and a new weekly air bridge running relief flights from Miami, with freight covered by Amazon. In addition, the USS Fort Lauderdale sat off La Guaira for weeks, Navy personnel helped assess the damaged port, and American search-and-rescue teams worked alongside crews from 29 countries pulling survivors from the rubble. That is real capacity, and it moved quickly. It is also, by the State Department's own account, mostly finished. The American search-and-rescue teams have already gone home, their job, in the Department's words, complete. The variable the Trump administration has struggled to manage was tested in the days after the quake. María Corina Machado, the country's most popular political figure and last year's Nobel Peace Prize winner, tried to fly home from Curaçao and then from Panama and asked Washington for help getting there. Two U.S. officials told the Associated Press that the administration talked her out of it (despite the president's recent denial), apparently out of concern that she intended to lead protests when the priority was supposed to be stabilization and recovery. For her part, Rodríguez wasn’t inclined to rely solely on Washington's discouragement. She shut down commercial air traffic into Caracas to prevent Machado’s return, a move that also grounded charter flights carrying hundreds of relief workers bound for the disaster zone. A government that couldn't get search teams to La Guaira in 48 hours proved fully capable of closing its airspace within days over a political rival. The legal footing under her is thin, too: Rodríguez's constitutional 180-day mandate as interim president lapsed July 3, and neither the National Assembly nor the U.S. administration has moved to address the legal problem that deadline raises in the week since. The administration would say it holds all the cards. It controls the oil revenue, it controls the sanctions relief, and as David Smilde has noted, the Justice Department has been building files on Rodríguez and government figures that could become indictments if the relationship sours. All true, and none of it reaches the actual problem. The earthquake exposed how little the government under Rodríguez can actually do. Washington's leverage operates on her decisions. Her government's basic capacity to function is a separate problem, and pressure on her does nothing to fix it. The Trump administration designed the January arrangement to get the things it wanted – oil and a political win – without the burden of actually running a broken country. The earthquake has established the burden anyway. Reconstruction will take years; the government cannot manage it; the opposition is waiting for an opening; and the U.S. attention span for Latin American crises has never been long. Trump wanted Venezuela off the front page as a problem solved. Six months later, it’s an open sore.