The State Department dispatched three specialized urban search and rescue teams to Venezuela and activated a Disaster Assistance Response Team comprising more than 250 personnel, the department said in a statement. Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the effort as a “big, fast, effective” and “whole-of-government” response, according to The Guardian.
The $150 million assistance fund pledged within 24 hours of the earthquakes exceeded any comparable U.S. commitment that Sam Vigersky, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former leader of U.S. disaster assistance response teams, said he had observed. Vigersky, who previously worked in USAID’s office of foreign disaster assistance, compiled indicators including the DART dispatch and search-and-rescue deployment and found the State Department was keeping pace with past U.S. responses to earthquakes in Turkey in 2023 and Haiti in 2021.
“This is their first real test, because of the magnitude of the disaster,” Susan Reichle, a former counselor for USAID who worked on disaster response including after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, told The Guardian. “It’s obviously within our hemisphere and it’s critical to our foreign policy under President Trump.”
The response comes after the administration shifted foreign disaster assistance from USAID to the State Department, cutting thousands of aid positions. The U.S. foreign assistance unit in Colombia had 144 staff before the cuts, Reichle said, but now has 14 members on the ground, and many ties have been severed with local nongovernmental organizations and contractors.
“On a positive side, they immediately did declare a disaster and called for the activation of the DART, as well as the search and rescue,” Reichle said, adding that the first 72 hours after an earthquake were crucial for reaching survivors.
Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, said Saturday that dozens of people had been rescued alive, according to The Guardian.
President Trump said Friday the U.S. had a “great relationship” with Venezuela since a January special forces operation captured former strongman Nicolás Maduro and brought him to the US to face narco-terrorism conspiracy and other federal charges. “Outside of what happened last night … it was a big earthquake, knocked down buildings, but outside [of the earthquake] it’s a happy country again, people are dancing in the streets,” Trump said, according to The Guardian.