Coverage of Venezuela's earthquakes has become the first major test for the country's press since Nicolás Maduro's removal, revealing greater freedom to report but also persistent censorship and restrictions on information access.
On June 27, three days after two earthquakes devastated Venezuela, the government restricted access to the coastal state of La Guaira, the hardest-hit area, citing public health concerns. Officials began requiring prior registration to enter, and foreign journalists, who had initially been transported by authorities on buses to the disaster zones, were now required to complete a bureaucratic accreditation process.
But for Álvaro Pérez-Kattar, a journalist with the Venezuelan radio station Circuito Líder, there was no time to lose.
Days later, Pérez-Kattar traveled from Caracas to La Guaira alongside a crew from the Spanish television network Telecinco.
"We're traveling in private vehicles without identifying ourselves. We're going to try to do our job," Pérez-Kattar told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR). "Time is of the essence. These are the crucial hours for rescuing as many survivors as possible, and we believe the press plays a fundamental role in that by helping raise awareness and putting pressure on more agencies to take action."
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In the aftermath of the earthquakes, Venezuelan journalists continue to face official secrecy and digital censorship that persists despite the recent unblocking of X. Even so, they have sought to fulfill their mission of informing the public and telling the human stories behind the tragedy by working around government restrictions and coordinating coverage through news partnerships.
The emergency has also highlighted how reporting conditions have changed since Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was captured by U.S. forces.
The Venezuelan National Press Workers Union (SNTP) had documented at least four restrictions on news reporting by June 30. The organization criticized the restrictions on access to affected areas and expressed support for journalists who have reached them despite those obstacles.
"We encourage the work of journalists who have ensured coverage, even by traveling on their own," the organization said on X. "Preventing on-the-ground reporting does not fix the emergency."
Journalists in the field report that the strictest restrictions are in La Guaira and at the hospitals where the injured have been taken.
"The first challenge is simply getting access because the areas are heavily restricted by the various authorities and security and rescue forces, which want to keep operations as closed off as possible so as not to interfere with the rescue effort itself," independent journalist Mikel de Abrisqueta, who is also accompanying international media crews, told LJR.
The team from the digital news outlet Runrun.es faced restrictions while trying to reach Carayaca, one of the most heavily damaged areas of La Guaira, where aid has reportedly taken longer to arrive.
"The area is under military control, and they only let people in up to a certain point, where donations are being delivered," Runrun.es Executive Director Carmen Riera told LJR. "They wouldn't let us go any farther, but at least we were able to see the destruction in that area."
Security staff prevented journalists from digital news outlet Efecto Cocuyo from reporting at a hospital, according to the SNTP. (Photo: Screenshot from Efecto Cocuyo on X)
Access to official information has been another major challenge in covering the disaster.
"The biggest difficulty has been being able to speak with authorities and official sources, and gaining access to data on people who have died and those who are missing," María Claudia Falanelli, a journalist with Unión Radio, told LJR.
Journalists report that outside La Guaira and the areas of greatest destruction, they have been able to work with greater freedom. Pérez-Kattar highlighted the presence of foreign media, something he said would have been unthinkable before Maduro's capture in January of this year.
"I think we're in a very different moment because on previous occasions the international press couldn't even enter the country," Pérez-Kattar said.
Falanelli, meanwhile, said that in Caracas she has even been able to collect interviews and video while security patrols were present — something that previously would have carried the risk of questioning or detention.
"They haven't even checked my press credential to see whether I'm actually a journalist," she said.
The twin earthquakes struck Venezuela's independent press after years of struggling to survive under censorship and harassment. To cover the aftermath of the disaster, independent news organizations have been making extraordinary efforts.
With reduced staffs, newsrooms have had to work longer hours, form partnerships for reporting and distribution, and carefully set editorial priorities, according to media directors interviewed by LJR.
The local newspaper El Impulso has prioritized coverage in affected cities near its headquarters in Lara state.
"We're not going to Caracas and La Guaira because there are already media outlets there. Meanwhile, these communities farther inland have received much less attention," El Impulso Director Gisela Carmona told LJR. She added that the newspaper is working jointly with at least 12 media organizations from different regions of the country, sharing reporting and information.
In Caracas, Runrun.es, TalCual and El Pitazo — members of the Alianza Rebelde Investiga collaborative reporting network — split their coverage by topic. During the first days after the earthquakes, Runrun.es focused on La Guaira, primarily its hospitals. TalCual covered the transportation of victims' bodies and death toll figures, while El Pitazo concentrated on collecting testimonies from people searching for missing relatives or trying to rescue loved ones trapped beneath the rubble, Riera said.
Journalist María Claudia Falanelli at a hospital interviewing a woman who had been rescued from the rubble. (Photo: Luis Carlos Calatrava)
Riera said that at this stage the alliance is focusing on the human toll of the disaster, leaving more explanatory and analytical reporting to organizations with greater resources and larger teams.
"We're covering the people, their pain, what they're lacking — service journalism," Riera said. "We'll be able to stop and explain everything afterward because right now we're out in the field."
Carmona, meanwhile, urged international media to pay attention to affected areas that are receiving little coverage rather than limiting their reporting to Caracas and La Guaira.
"Don't just cover the obvious," she said. "You could help us bring visibility to the places where we're struggling, not the places where all the attention is already focused."
The block on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, was lifted by most internet service providers one day after the earthquakes, according to Conexión Segura y Libre, a nonprofit organization that monitors and documents digital censorship in Venezuela through its VE Sin Filtro project.
The platform had been blocked since August 2024 on Maduro's orders following controversy over that year's elections. But after an intensive campaign by organizations including VE Sin Filtro and PROVEA calling for an end to digital censorship during the emergency, most internet providers restored access to X.
"The platform is extremely important in Venezuela for staying informed, and it was blocked, which affected people's ability to know what was happening," Andrés Azpúrua, executive director of Conexión Segura y Libre, told LJR. "Right now Twitter is accessible through virtually all internet providers."
The restoration of access to X is allowing people to obtain information from independent news outlets about the earthquakes, Azpúrua said. However, he added that this alone is not enough during a crisis like this.
"You can't tell a story in a tweet. An investigative article doesn't fit in a tweet. Context doesn't fit in a tweet. And with Twitter's algorithm, you don't get to choose what you read or how you stay informed," Azpúrua said.
Since Maduro's departure, some independent news organizations have reported that their websites have become partially accessible again. One of them is *El Impulso*, whose director said she discovered in April that she could once again access the newspaper's website. In her latest monitoring after the earthquakes, Carmona was also able to access at least two other digital news sites without using a VPN, or virtual private network, applications that route internet connections through servers in other countries and are widely used in Venezuela to circumvent digital blocks.
Both Carmona and Riera said that recent tests showed the same digital news outlet could be accessible in one city while remaining blocked in another, even when users were connected through the same internet service providers.
Azpúrua said it is possible for some domains to become temporarily accessible because of technical failures or other reasons, rather than as the result of an intentional decision to lift restrictions. He added that VE Sin Filtro sees no indication that censorship of independent media will be suspended during the emergency.
"It's an achievement for civil society that it managed to force the government to unblock X, which is an extremely important platform," Azpúrua said. "But that doesn't solve the broader problem. Censorship is still limiting freedom of expression and the public's right to information."
As of June 30, VE Sin Filtro had documented 202 domains blocked by CONATEL, Venezuela's telecommunications regulator, including 65 news websites.
¡Desbloquar a medias no es suficente!
Para que @X funcione plenamente, incluyendo el contenido multimedia y su web, los proveedores de #internetVE tienen que desbloquear los otros dominios que usa X:
*.twitter·com
pbs.twimg·com
abs.twimg·com
video.twimg·com
t·co https://t.co/ZPXa73jUPE pic.twitter.com/HOyxzmoONT— VE sin Filtro (@vesinfiltro) June 25, 2026
This article was translated with AI assistance and reviewed by Jorge Valencia
