Even before two powerful earthquakes reduced the OPPE 25 government housing project to an anarchy of shattered concrete and broken lives, the foundations of Hugo Chávez’s populist “Bolivarian” revolution were shaking in what was once a hotbed of support.

Gabriel González remembers his elation when, in 2013, he received the keys to his freshly completed apartment in one of the 12-floor tower blocks El Comandante had ordered to be built in an affluent corner of the resort town of Caraballeda.

The 45-year-old construction worker lost his home during deadly mudslides and spent two years in an emergency shelter before receiving his new home near the beach. “It was wonderful,” recalled González, for years a proud supporter of Chávez’s socialist party, the PSUV. “The Chávez government helped the poor so much … Back then, everyone was on Chávez’s side.”

But shortly after González moved into OPPE 25, Chávez died, and in the years that followed, the builder said his feelings – and those of many neighbours – began to sour. Years of poverty, mass migration, hyperinflation and authoritarian rule under Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, fuelled widespread discontent. “Everyone around here said the Bolivarian revolution … was no more – that it was no longer the same,” said González, whose siblings fled to the US and Brazil. “Unfortunately, what happened is that it became a dictatorship.”

Then came last month’s twin earthquakes, which devastated Venezuela’s north coast and revealed a revolution in ruins as Chávez’s heirs struggled to respond to a catastrophe for which they seemed woefully ill-prepared.

“We don’t have a government,” González complained one recent morning as he stood by the donated tent where he sleeps on a golf course near his obliterated home. Two weeks after the disaster, González’s 22-year-old son, Daniel, and mother-in-law, Esmeralda, are still missing. His family squats by the wreckage as they wait for news.

Like many residents of La Guaira, the northern state worst hit by the disaster, González criticised the sluggish reaction of Venezuela’s acting leader, Delcy Rodríguez, the former vice-president who was installed in January after Maduro was abducted by Donald Trump.

“Unfortunately, I haven’t seen anyone here. I haven’t seen a governor. I haven’t seen a mayor,” said González, who spent 24 hours buried under the rubble of OPPE 25 with his wife, Rosa, before they were miraculously rescued with hardly a scratch. The couple now depend on humanitarians and church members who visit with food parcels and prayers.

Once González had finished speaking, a local pastor, Ismael Yarves, opened a suede-bound Bible and read from Psalm 46, its words contrasting with the paucity of the government response. “God is our hope and strength, a very present help in trouble,” Yarves proclaimed. “Therefore will we not fear, though the earth be moved, and though the hills be carried into the midst of the sea.”

Experts agree few nations would have been fully prepared for the astonishing ferocity of the 24 June disaster – 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude quakes that struck less than a minute apart, toppling large, densely populated buildings such as OPPE 25 in seconds.

“It was a truly extraordinary event,” said Carlos Genatios, a structural engineer and natural disaster planning specialist who served as science and technology minister after Chávez took power in 1999.

Genatios said the earthquakes released energy equivalent to 240 of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. “It was much worse than the [7.0] earthquake in Haiti, which is considered the 21st century’s greatest catastrophe,” he added.

Even so, Genatios, who went into exile after writing articles criticising Maduro’s regime, believed the government had questions to answer about a calamity that killed at least 4,118 people and injured nearly 17,000.

Why, in a known seismic zone, were such large buildings erected on soft soils that shook like jelly during the earthquakes? Were social housing projects such as OPPE 25 – and other nearby luxury properties, which also collapsed – properly built, with adequate materials and following strict building codes? Had Venezuela’s Chavista rulers been sufficiently focused on preparing the seismology, health and emergency services for a natural disaster? Or had they been distracted by their obsession with retaining power?

Genatios believed that once the dust settled, a thorough investigation was needed to determine where blame lay. But the former minister was convinced lives could have been saved had successive governments better planned for such disasters. “It would have been impossible to have zero losses,” Genatios argued. “But the losses could have been far fewer.”

Loss was everywhere on the streets around OPPE 25 last week as distraught, sleep-starved families clawed and tunnelled their way through an apocalyptic landscape of crumpled tower blocks in search of loved ones. Occasionally, they interrupted their excavations to watch corpse collectors in yellow helmets and blue scrubs haul grotesquely disfigured bodies from the debris.

Relatives of those entombed under broken buildings had painted pleas for support on their front walls. “Precident Deisy Rodrigues [sic] – please help. My son is in here,” read one message on a block of flats a few streets from OPPE 25.

Many survivors said that in the crucial hours and days after the tragedy, help never arrived. Alongside the mourning, there is profound anger at what many perceive as the lethargic, bungled response from Rodríguez’s officials and troops, with dust-coated civilians taking the lead in trying to extricate victims from giant heaps of concrete while security forces stood about holding guns.

“There are more rifles here than pickaxes and shovels – and what we need is pickaxes and shovels,” complained Milagri Rodríguez Guanire, one of nearly 8 million Venezuelans to have migrated in recent years, who flew in from Chile to hunt for her mother, Ymelda, in the wreckage of OPPE 25.

Fury over the government’s response has amplified longstanding grievances that have been building for years in working-class areas that were traditionally bastions of regime support.

The estate’s walls are adorned with propaganda celebrating the “eternal giant” Hugo Chávez and his mustachioed heir Maduro, depicted in one mural as an “iron-fisted” superhero called Súper Bigote (Super Moustache).

But many voiced sadness and indignation at how, after Chávez’s years of oil bonanza, the energy-rich South American country nosedived into one of the worst economic crises in modern history under Maduro because of plunging crude prices, inept governance, corruption and crippling US sanctions.

“[It’s] a pile of shit … we need to get rid of these rats,” fumed Roberto Dupuy, a 65-year-old cook, whose daughter was lost when two of OPPE 25’s seven towers came crashing down. The ruins of the remaining five buildings were so severely damaged that they also seemed close to keeling over.

Other residents of Chávez-era estates along Caraballeda’s Caribbean coast spoke angrily of how they suspected they had been housed in badly built death traps, where the ceilings leaked, the lifts didn’t work and the powdery cement walls left some wondering how sturdy the structures were. “They were poor-quality buildings – that’s why they collapsed and killed so many people,” claimed González’s father-in-law, Marciel Edilberto Llarve, who lived in a development called OPPE 33, which also disintegrated.

Llarve, whose wife remains buried there, compared his family’s transfer from a rickety hillside shack to the brand new tower block to being unwittingly sent to the guillotine. “They took us from the poverty of life to the riches of death,” he said. “This building was made of jelly.”

As Maduro employed increasingly draconian tactics to survive successive waves of protests, uprisings and even an assassination attempt, González said many of OPPE 25’s inhabitants concealed their political opinions for fear of being ratted on by members of the Socialist party’s neighbourhood committee and losing their benefits, jobs or homes – or even being arrested.

His sister-in-law, Yolife Llarve, recalled scenes of exhilaration when residents flocked to polling stations during 2024’s presidential election hoping to vote Maduro out. “People were excited. They were happy. Lots of people thought it was the end. We were sure it was the end, until they announced the results,” Llarve said of the vote, which Maduro is widely believed to have stolen from the opposition movement led by the exiled Nobel laureate María Corina Machado.

Venezuela’s former dictator is now languishing in a New York prison, having been seized by US special forces in a dramatic 3 January raid. A wall painting near OPPE 25 quotes Maduro’s statement during a court appearance two days after his rendition. “I’m innocent. I’m a decent man. And I am still the president of my country,” it reads, although part of the mural crumbled during the earthquakes.

Trump unexpectedly backed Rodríguez after capturing her boss and has called her a “terrific person” who is helping US oil and mining companies do business in a country that was until recently a cradle of anti-imperialism but many now consider a protectorate. But the acting president’s political future looks uncertain, amid widespread outrage over her handling of the earthquakes. One post-disaster poll showed 63% of Venezuelans disapproved of Rodríguez, while nearly half thought fresh elections more urgent than reconstruction efforts, although some suspect the earthquakes will reduce pressure for a vote.

Rodríguez has defended her government’s “tireless” response to the disaster, attributing criticism to a malicious media conspiracy cooked up in propaganda “laboratories”. She has also pushed back at claims that Chávez’s signature housing projects were shoddily built, saying most fallen buildings were commercial developments.

Genatios, the ex-minister, believed the earthquakes and their aftermath had exposed how “the revolution was a lie”. “Venezuela’s government is an utterly failed one, with less and less public support,” he said. “Its revolutionary rhetoric about helping the poor … is a facade completely detached from reality … There’s absolutely no revolution [any more] – their motivation is basically just money and power. There’s no revolution. Nothing. It doesn’t exist.”

Rodríguez Guanire echoed those sentiments as she took a break from digging for her mother in the rubble-clogged entrance to one of OPPE 25’s fractured towers. “I think people have had enough … We’ve had 27 years of this plague,” she said of Chavismo, predicting that sooner or later the regime would fall.

“I feel like [the earthquakes] were a Pandora’s box or the straw that broke the camel’s back, so everyone can see that enough is enough with what is happening in Venezuela,” added Rodríguez Guanire, who wore a white mask to shield her from clouds of toxic dust and the sickly scent of death.

Moments later, a government ambulance pulled up outside OPPE 33 after reports a survivor had been found, trapped under 12 layers of pancaked concrete slabs. The side of the emergency vehicle was branded with an adhesive vinyl photo of a grinning Nicolás Maduro. But vandals had peeled away chunks of the fallen dictator’s head and face. All around the ambulance, the buildings, and Chávez’s revolution, lay in ruins.

Additional reporting by Clavel Rangel