By Roger Ricardo Luis on December 17, 2023
The La Vargas Venezuela landslide, 1999
At the beginning of December nineteen ninety-nine, when humanity was getting ready to wait for the arrival of the new millennium, Venezuela was about to experience one of the worst tragedies in its history: the Vargas Landslide.
The State La Guaira located on the central coast of the country, with an area of 1,497 km. extends along an extensive and narrow Caribbean coastline backed by a mountain range with peaks of more than two thousand meters of altitude.Heavy rainfall left more than eighteen hundred millimeters of water in the first weeks of that month, causing saturation of soils and torrents that came down slopes of more than thirty degrees, and carried with them soil, rocks, trees and the topsoil of the mountains.
Although today the figures are still varied and controversial, it is estimated that the avalanches caused some fifteen thousand dead and missing people, three and a half billion dollars in losses, the destruction of more than fifteen thousand homes and some seventy-five thousand victims.
On December 15, 1999, the natural disaster in the state of Vargas became a national tragedy.
With the misfortune upon us, an immense rescue and salvage operation began, directed by President Hugo Chávez, who had taken office just months before. The action brought out the best of the country, but Venezuela was not prepared for a disaster of such magnitude.
The avalanches were waves of mud and huge stones crushing everything in their path; the poor neighborhoods of the hills fell like leaves from trees enveloped by the avalanche; housing developments such as Carmen de Uria and Los Corales, erected in the river beds, disappeared when those furious currents reappeared reclaiming their old riverbeds; there, ten-story buildings collapsed or were broken in two before the demolishing thrust of the torrent; and even the containers in the port of La Guiara were thrown into the sea.
This is the end of the world,” shouted a woman who was looking for her husband among the jumble of sticks and stones on the dreary sands of the beach of the Caraballeda beach resort.
A study by the Central University of Venezuela shows that the landslide caused the sliding of about 15 million cubic meters of sediments that transformed the geographic scenario of the tragedy: for example, more than one thousand new hectares were swallowed up by sea and rearranging the land to the coast.
Cuba Arrives
On December seventeenth, nineteen ninety-nine, the first Cuban medical brigade arrived in the Morocha to provide aid after the first landslides that were still continuing.
Four hundred and fifty seven health workers, in successive flights, arrived at the Maiquetia International Airport (turned into a rescue and salvage operations center) to mitigate the human damage, thus marking a historic milestone in the relations between the peoples of Cuba and Venezuela.
It was not only the first time that Cuban doctors arrived in solidarity to the sister nation, but it also became the seed of what months later would become the Bolivarian program of Barrio Adentro and the rest of the long and fruitful Cuban medical collaboration there.
At the peak of the collaboration, fifty-four brigades were in the field of disaster, while in Cuba more than a thousand doctors and paramedical personnel were volunteering their desire to serve Bolivar’s homeland.
Journalistic experience
Under the guidance of Commander in Chief Fidel Castro, the medical contingent that left for Vargas was accompanied by a team of journalists from Granma, Juventud Rebelde, Radio Habana Cuba, Radio Rebelde, the Cuban Television Information System, Prensa Latina and the National Information Agency.
The reporting task was nourished by the experiences of Cuban personnel in the disaster area, both on the coast of Vargas and in the states of Zulia and Miranda affected by floods, as well as by the testimonies of the population and the reflection of the colossal efforts of the nascent Bolivarian government to mitigate the wounds of the catastrophe.
This was the first time in the annals of Cuban journalism that a team of reporters from the Island faced a high-risk coverage at a time when landslides were still occurring.
Furthermore, the Vargas catastrophe became from the beginning a line of attack by the Venezuelan opposition against Chavez and the nascent revolution which, precisely on December 15, had won the referendum for the Yes to the Bolivarian Constitution.
The intense anti-Cuban campaign unleashed by the Venezuelan opposition against the presence of our health personnel in the affected areas was not lacking in this event.
The report of the Vargas tragedy and the solidarity presence of Cuban health personnel there, has remained in the archives and cyberspace as a testimony of that epic, also in the book Venezuela after the Deluge, by the author of this article, published in Cuba by our Editorial Pablo de la Torriente Brau and, in Venezuela, by the Imprenta Nacional.
Roger Ricardo Luis is a Professor of the Faculty of Communication of the University of Havana. Head of the Discipline of Print Journalism and Agencies. Twice winner of the José Martí Latin American Journalism Award.
Source: Cubaperiodista, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English