Emergency funding worth $10 million (AED 36.7 million) has been earmarked by the UAE to help Venezuelans dig out from the back-to-back earthquakes that flattened buildings across the country’s north this week. The decision came at the direction of President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, with the UAE Aid Agency tasked to channel the money into food, medical care, shelter materials and other immediate necessities.
The agency’s chairman, Dr. Tareq Ahmed Al Ameri, said survivors are contending with desperate living conditions that leave no room for delay in getting help on the ground. He cast the response as part of a broader pattern of Emirati assistance to populations hit by disaster worldwide, crediting the example set by the country’s founding ruler, the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, and the present leadership’s approach to humanitarian relief.
Al Ameri added that the agency has opened lines of coordination with Venezuelan officials and international bodies to speed deliveries to the hardest-hit communities. Beyond meeting raw survival needs, the funding is meant to jump-start the recovery phase and steady affected areas as they begin to rebuild.
The aid follows a pair of powerful tremors that hit on June 24. The U.S. Geological Survey recorded a magnitude 7.2 quake followed roughly 39 seconds later by a magnitude 7.5 event, the two epicenters sitting only a few miles apart in northern Venezuela, west of Caracas and near the Caribbean coast town of Morón. Seismologists have labeled the pairing a “doublet,” an unusual sequence in which two major ruptures fire almost simultaneously.
Casualty estimates have moved upward and differ depending on the source. Venezuela’s National Assembly president, Jorge Rodríguez, reported 188 dead, 1,520 injured and 157 missing as of June 25, while Health Minister Carlos Alvarado later put the figure near 235 dead and roughly 4,300 injured in remarks carried by CNN and NBC News. USGS modeling has flagged a substantial chance the eventual toll could reach into the thousands or higher, which would rank the disaster among the deadliest to strike Latin America in over a century.
Acting President Delcy Rodríguez declared a state of emergency, identifying the coastal area of La Guaira as the worst affected. According to NPR, a United Nations humanitarian agency counted more than 100 collapsed structures in La Guaira alone. The stronger of the two quakes stands as the most violent to hit Venezuela since 1900.
External help has converged on the country in the days since. Search-and-rescue teams from the United States, drawn from Fairfax County, Virginia, and Los Angeles County, were deployed alongside personnel dispatched by Mexico, with convoys from El Salvador and the Dominican Republic reaching Venezuela by June 26.
