Security forces in La Guaira have deployed tear gas and bullhorns to disperse subterranean coalitions of civilians refusing to vacate collapsed buildings.
LA GUAIRA, Venezuela — Following back-to-back earthquakes that devastated this coastal port city, the Venezuelan Interior Ministry formally designated the estimated hundreds of residents currently pinned beneath collapsed apartment blocks as an illegal and subversive political assembly.
The smell of pulverized concrete mingled with the sharp, chemical tang of state-issued tear gas drifting off the Caribbean Sea on Thursday morning. Above a flattened residential complex in the city center, heavily armed officers of the Bolivarian National Guard paced the perimeter, issuing warnings through bullhorns for the trapped civilians to immediately disperse and return to their non-existent homes.
Authorities confirmed the seismic events have left at least 188 people dead and injured more than 1,500. However, the administration of President Nicolás Maduro has focused its emergency response entirely on the hundreds of citizens who remain closely clustered together beneath several thousand tons of rebar, characterizing their prolonged presence in the rubble as a deliberate provocation engineered by Washington.
We are closely monitoring these subterranean coalitions, which have clearly coordinated to occupy municipal airspace below ground level without proper revolutionary permits.
By midday, state television network VTV had ceased broadcasting appeals for heavy lifting equipment, shifting instead to a documentary accusing the Caribbean tectonic plate of harboring deep-seated imperialist sympathies and operating in direct coordination with the CIA.
Local search-and-rescue teams, initially deployed to dig through the debris, were quietly replaced by riot police equipped with water cannons. At press time, officers were actively barricading the perimeter of a collapsed hospital to prevent the trapped patients inside from initiating a general strike.