Venezuela’s Earthquakes Leave Children Facing Trauma, Displacement and Food Insecurity

This story by Omarela Depablos originally appeared on Global Voices on August 28, 2026.

This article is as part of the Special Coverage “Inside Venezuela’s Earthquake Disaster,” where we examine the aftermath of the earthquakes, share stories from the ground, and explore the human impact, recovery efforts, and challenges facing affected communities. The names of the children have been changed to guarantee their protection.

This story was produced with the support of Moving Minds Alliance (MMA) through the Reporters for Early Age Children in Crisis (REACH) Advocacy Stories Fund.

“Why is the earth angry with people?” five-year-old Elyas asks his grandmother, as he lays in the middle of a maze of bunk beds set up beneath a white tent at a sports complex in La Guaira, Venezuela. His family do not have the answer to such a profound question.

The double earthquake on June 24 erased part of the city where he grew up. Dozens of structures he knew are now piles of rubble. Meanwhile, other buildings that remain standing like cracked skeletons threaten to come crashing down at any moment.

Elyas’s family is concerned by the precision with which he describes how a two-storey wall collapsed onto his father’s back and cut his grandmother’s hand. “We try to distract him, but he starts talking about it on his own and asks everything,” says his mother, Sandra.

In the child’s new routine, rain is no longer just water falling from the sky. With every downpour, he anticipates his mother’s warning that “the earth is going to shake again.” According to her, the roar of thunder reminds him of the sound that cracked apart his home in Punta de Mulatos in La Guaira, the most devastated section of the six states along Venezuela’s northern coast that the earthquakes impacted.

“He hears an airplane and gets scared; thunder and he gets scared […] there was an event with Mickey Mouse, and when they set off the confetti gun, it went ‘Pow!’ and he started running.”

Janet Guerra, a psychologist at Andrés Bello Catholic University and a specialist in child development, explains that while children in their early years of life do not process these events logically, they remain “etched in the body.” The period between zero and five years of age, which is vital for their biological growth, is also vital for the development of the psyche.

“If this fear is not drained, the child may develop a cycle of paralysis or emotional dysregulation in the face of future stressful events,” warns Guerra, noting that this consequence can even extend into adulthood, where they will react without rationally understanding the origin of their distress.

Nearly 3.9 million children live in the areas affected by the earthquakes, according to UNICEF, and hundreds of thousands face an urgent need for housing, food, and psychological support.

See Also: Why Venezuela’s Earthquakes Were So Devastating: Geology, Vulnerability, and Years of Structural Neglect

The Emotions Children Cannot Name

On a phone, Elyas and his mother look at photographs and videos of what their life used to be like before the disaster: their last Christmas dinner, his cousin’s 15th birthday celebration, and when they painted the house they are now afraid to return to. It is difficult for Elyas to stay still. He soon jumps up, pushes his father’s wheelchair, and runs around on the artificial grass with other boys and girls.

Since arriving at the camp, he has become more “restless” and “terrible.” Sometimes, his parents say, he “doesn’t listen at all.” According to the experts consulted, this behavior is simply one of the ways children express emotions that they cannot or do not know how to name.

In the shelters scattered around Caracas and La Guaira, some mothers, fathers, and caregivers say that their sons and daughters “don’t know” or “don’t understand” what is happening because “they’re very little.” However, Argelia Escalona, a social worker at Cecodap, dispels this myth: “They do understand, they do feel, and they do suffer — even the youngest ones, from zero to two years old. They absorb the tension in their surroundings and express it through their behavior, which is why they need more attentive observation, and caregivers [also] need to take care of themselves.”

See Also: From Mexico to Venezuela: A Diaspora’s Race to Save Lives

The Hidden Cost of a Broken Routine

A few meters from Elyas, sitting on a thin mattress without sheets, two sisters — six-year-old Daniela, and one-year-old Albany — cry in unison. The older girl cannot take her eyes off her hands; a prank involving a tube of glue left them red and irritated. The baby’s crying is more difficult to decipher.

After soothing Daniela’s pain with water and cream, their mother Claudia breastfeeds Albany in an attempt to calm her; within seconds, the baby pulls away and starts crying again. Her distress is due to the absence of her main source of nourishment: her bottle.

“Here, she doesn’t have her milk, her oatmeal, or her fororo [a corn-based drink]. Sometimes I breastfeed her, sometimes I give her food from the dining hall, but she has had a hard time getting used to it. That’s why she’s like this: crying all the time,” she says.

According to Marianella Herrera, a nutritionist with the Bengoa Foundation, this is an expected response to the disruption of the child’s routine. In emergencies, the country’s shelters and temporary camps depend on the availability of supplies, which means that food from communal kitchens, such as rice, black beans, or arepas, is often prioritized over the specific nutritional needs of early childhood.

Before the earthquake, food security among children in Venezuela was already dire, with child malnutrition beginning to accelerate in 2016 as a consequence of the humanitarian crisis. The latest bulletin from Cáritas Venezuela, from March 2024, indicates that in 67 percent of the communities monitored in the country, acute, moderate, and severe malnutrition among children under five exceeds health-alert levels.

The twin earthquakes tragedy also found state protection agencies “severely weakened and under-resourced […] without a budget, transportation, or social workers,” denounces Gloria Perdomo of Redhnna. This gap is worsened by cuts in international aid and restrictions on NGOs that the Venezuelan government imposed.

As a result, the bottle that once arrived at a fixed time is now dependent on the logistics of whichever shelter a family happens to be staying in, interfering with each infant’s transition to solid foods. “If a boy or girl has not yet fully transitioned to eating at the family table, their nutritional situation becomes critical when it is impossible to offer adapted meals amid mass assistance,” Herrera explains.

Such disruption also affects the child’s emotional security, Guerra adds, because it breaks the routine that provided order and calm to the child’s psyche.

Claudia rocks her baby in her arms as she waits in line to receive a bag of food. She looks around with a sigh of distrust: “They say they are giving out houses in Caracas. It’s far away, but we want to go there.” At the moment, she and her family rely on the camp because the loss of their home has also fractured her daughters’ food security. The worst-case scenario could well result in malnutrition for her baby, something she has already experienced with her older daughter, who has struggled with fluctuations in her weight and height since her first year of life.

Claudia looks at the food in the bag she has just received. She takes out fruit purées, cookies, and corn tortillas, among other things, but there is no milk, formula, or oatmeal. She believes that as the days pass, the baby will gradually get used to the shelter food or breastfeeding. Beside her, Daniela savors a cookie and asks when the truck will come to take them to Caracas. Like her mother, she believes that in a new shelter, they will have the chance to find a new home.

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