In 2024, Venezuela's emergency was saving democracy. In 2026, it's surviving disaster.
In both instances, Venezuelans there and here in South Florida have marshaled forces online to work around their repressive and incompetent regime.
In 2024, Venezuelans and the diaspora organized a remarkable, grassroots social media effort that proved the country's socialist dictatorship had lost — and robbed — that summer’s presidential election.
The comanditos, or little command cells project, used several platforms to watchdog precincts and tally valid vote results — all under the regime’s nose. Last month, that campaign even won the Grand Prix for Good at the Cannes Lions communications creativity awards in France.
Coincidentally, the Cannes Lion award was announced on June 26 — just two days after two earthquakes demolished much of Venezuela’s north-central coast near the capital, Caracas, especially the state of La Guaira.
The quakes have killed at least 3,000 people. Thousands are injured and tens of thousands are still missing.
Meanwhile, the same corrupt regime that brutally stole the 2024 election has been widely condemned for what critics call its weak, obstructive and, in some instances, criminal response to this catastrophe.
But one saving grace is those grassroots social media skills Venezuelans honed in 2024.
READ MORE: A pilot's grit overcomes grief — and inspires expats racing to aid earthquake-ravaged Venezuela
“Venezuelans in 2024 learned how to organize quickly, effectively and anonymously,” said Venezuelan expat activist Maria Alejandra Marquez of Miami.
"That experience and training were key to what is happening now."
Days after last month's earthquakes, Marquez began noticing myriad new messaging groups and crowdsourcing platforms providing Venezuelan disaster help.
Some use facial recognition and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to help locate or rescue the missing. Some monitor what hospitals are still functioning; how badly damaged buildings are; where to find food or generators.
Others, like Hazlo Hoy, or Do It Today, are one-stop sites for an array of post-earthquake rescue and survival needs.
“This is a replica of the comanditos of 2024," Marquez told WLRN.
"That way of connecting is happening now spontaneously — and it’s a marvel to see amongst all the despair and the sadness.”
Venezuela's acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, insists her government is getting disaster assistance to survivors, and that privately built edifices as well as publicly constructed housing collapsed in the earthquakes.
She also noted that police and soldiers caught looting after the quakes have been arrested.
Still, most Venezuelans say they're angry at the regime's sluggish and erratic performance.
As a result, Marquez — who heads INRAV, a nonprofit that monitors Venezuelan regime corruption — feels one of the most important lessons from the 2024 election for the 2026 earthquake is that social media coordination is an empowering tool for defying a repressive government and replacing a useless one.
“Venezuelans have been able to create these networks of trust against a dictatorship," she said.
"For example, within hours of the earthquakes, people started buying satellite connections — just to help La Guaira get connected.”
“This spontaneous way of connecting is a replica of the 2024 comanditos effort — and it’s a marvel to see amidst all the Venezuelan despair and the sadness.”Maria Alejandra Marquez
That coastal state of La Guaira was hardest hit by the Venezuela earthquakes — and much of it is now reduced to rubble.
It’s where another South Florida Venezuelan expat, Maria Eugenia Pardo of Wellington in Palm Beach County, has a legion of relatives.
After the quakes she began trying to locate one especially close cousin, José Gregorio Ibarra, and his family.
“So in our social networks, we started posting pictures," Pardo said.
"Missing, missing, missing, missing.”
Finding La Nena
When that conventional approach yielded little, Pardo discovered a burst of WhatsApp message groups consolidated in one site called Grupos de WhatsApp La Guaira.
It opened information pathways about La Guaira inhabitants: their apartment buildings, who lives on what floors, who else has been making inquiries about them. One result, Pardo said:
“They found La Nena” — the nickname of her cousin’s 73-year-old mother-in-law, María Sánchez. She survived — and was located via the turbocharged platform networking that was a hallmark of the 2024 election vigilance.
As of Monday, Pardo had yet to find Ibarra, his wife and their two daughters. She had, however, found new hope by getting connected to others it turns out are looking for them, too — people who were once strangers to her, like her cousin’s sister-in-law from Panama, who traveled to La Guaira after the earthquakes.
“Now she writes to me from the campsite where she’s looking for my family," Pardo said.
"And ... and it made me feel that I am part of the search, even if I am here, not there. I think that that’s amazing.”
As in the 2024 comanditos effort, South Florida’s large Venezuelan diaspora is playing a large support role in this new, disaster-related social media campaign.
Prominent among the expat coordination is Lesly Simon, president of the Venezuelan-American Chamber of Commerce Foundation in Miami.
“The diaspora's not only raising money to support all these platforms and fly rescuers to Venezuela, but it's then using the skills of the community — persons who have abilities in AI, who can put it all together in a web page, and then coordinate with first responders and doctors in Venezuela," Simon said.
"It has been able to save lives and find missing persons.”
It is once again, in other words, showing Venezuela’s reviled regime how things get done — in democracy or disaster.
