Coincidence is often the space where power inscribes its oldest truths. On June 24, 2026, the earth shook in La Guaira while the drums of San Juan resounded in Naiguatá, and that instant of broken ground and clanking drums was enough for the oldest colonial reflex on the continent to reappear on social media and in the streets, using the uncertainty of the earthquake to demonize the practices of the historically excluded. The cause of the catastrophe is always uncertain, and that uncertainty is the space that the colonial matrix of power has filled for centuries with a pre-prepared interpretation where coincidence automatically becomes causality.
The habit of interpreting a natural event as a condemnation from the gods repeats the same script as on March 26, 1812, when an earthquake destroyed Caracas on Holy Thursday and Archbishop Coll y Prat preached in the streets, amidst the ruins and with bodies still buried under the rubble, declaring that the catastrophe was divine punishment for the audacity of rising up against the king. In this sense, Simón Bolívar's famous response, "If nature opposes us, we will fight against it," cannot be read as an outburst of arrogance or superiority, but rather as a political stance representing the refusal to allow the catastrophe to serve as an argument for the enemy to perpetuate their domination. Both in 1812 and in 2026, we find the same structure: an uncertain cause and a colonial matrix filling that uncertainty with its pre-prepared classification, pointing to the bodies and practices that the dominant hierarchy needs to declare as the origin of chaos and disorder.
This colonial urgency to dismantle the strength of the reunited community is not limited to natural events, nor does it require an open catastrophe to operate on the bodies that embody a popular project. “Zambo,” “santero,” “negro” were epithets used by certain discourses to stigmatize President Chávez, labels that, within the colonial matrix of power, attempted to place him outside any political legitimacy. It is the same colonial inertia that resurfaced in April of this year through a crowd gathered in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol who, at the top of their lungs, decided to call the acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, a “monkey.” It is the same operation now being carried out against a Maroon woman with the aim of highlighting the supposed incapacity of these historically excluded sectors to govern. The coastal drum and the Bolivarian and Chavista political project share the same coding because both represent the power of an ungovernable collective body, the power of a community that resists being administered by the centers of power.
What this hierarchical perspective can never foresee is that its own control mechanisms end up fostering the very encounters it so fears. In the 16th century, the pearl industry of Cubagua sent enslaved people to the mainland as available labor for the next harvest (of cacao), and this logistical decision meant that the Margarita archipelago inherited the name of the municipality of San Juan but remained devoid of the musical tradition that this saint carries within the brotherhoods of Barlovento and the mainland coast. The historian Castañeda documents that, between 1581 and 1590, 923 kidnapped Africans entered Margarita for sale, a transit dynamic that explains why the population of San Juan, in the Díaz municipality, originally lacked the rhythm of the drum. However, the bodies that passed through here left a silent presence in the territory. Therefore, when the Marcos Pérez Jiménez dictatorship evicted the people of Turiamo, in Aragua, in 1957 to build a naval base, the displaced families who decided to come to San Juan de Margarita arrived carrying the Sangueo and Parranda traditions with them, planting them in fertile soil. The drum of Turiamo took root strongly on the island because its ancestral roots already resided there.
The Brotherhood of Saint John One Heart exists today in this archipelago because that displacement deposited here what four centuries of exploitation had prevented from taking root. By trading in the enslaved bodies after the collapse of Cubagua in the 16th century and exiling an entire coastal people in the 20th, the colonial order unwittingly built the bridges for this reunion. The surplus that the system expels and persecutes always returns through the channels that power itself constructs to protect itself. Therefore, the ringing of the bells that coincided with the earthquake is not the origin of a catastrophe, but the living memory of that reunion that the colonial order could never prevent. Faced with the old strategy of using broken earth to impose fear, the persistence of that spirit demonstrates that, just as with the ruins of 1812, the will of a community rooted in its territory always has the final say.
