Gavin Lee is pleased to welcome Germania Rodriguez Paleo, American-Venezuelan journalist and commentator, former US chief reporter for the Daily Mail. She offers a forceful political interpretation of Venezuela’s earthquake disaster through the lens of institutional collapse and democratic illegitimacy. Rodriguez Paleo argues that while the earthquake itself was a natural event, the scale of the resulting humanitarian catastrophe was profoundly shaped by decades of political decay. Throughout the discussion, she distinguishes between unavoidable natural destruction and what she describes as preventable institutional failure, contending that corruption, weakened public institutions, deteriorating infrastructure, and the absence of an effective emergency response transformed a geological disaster into a national tragedy.