Amidst the pile of debris formed into impossible shapes, an aging woman awaits a mere return. Fourteen days have passed since the double earthquake destroyed much of the Central Coast buildings in Venezuela. María P. just wants to recover her sister’s body, trapped between columns and concrete slabs, some pulverized and others stacked like pancakes, which until June 24 had formed the 12 floors of Tower H in the Opppe 26 housing project in Caraballeda, La Guaira state (formerly Vargas state). “My sister was always happy to live in the Ope since she got her apartment 14 years ago,” she mumbles.
Amidst the ruins, it is hard to imagine the original arrangement of the towers in the Opppe 26 complex that crumbled a few meters from the José María España avenue, between Playa Los Cocos and Playa Sheraton. “The Ope A, B, C, and G, H, I were in the middle; those were the ones that fell,” a man instructs reporters from Armando.Info. His voice breaks; he says several family members died there.
As if marking the sand of a mournful coliseum, six other towers of the housing project remain standing, three on each side, but with notable structural damage. Their apartments are exposed, lacking walls and with cracked columns. It is a glimpse into the everyday intimacy that the twin earthquakes on St. John’s Day halted: shirts still hanging, beds pushed against walls that no longer exist, and in the spaces where local businesses once operated, characteristic of the buildings constructed by the governmental Presidential Office of Plans and Special Projects (Opppe, the acronym that names the residential complexes), crushed hot dog carts and barely recognizable stores with colorful price signs scribbled by hand.
The Opppe was founded in October 2009 by a decree from President Hugo Chávez, which tasked it with “identifying, planning, projecting, and executing urban, architectural, or landscaping actions of an extraordinary nature.” But that mission became urgent in 2010, focusing on the victims of the landslides that year, affecting the states of Falcón, Miranda, the Capital District, and Vargas, as another decree from Chávez later established an emergency in December of the same year.
Since then, the urgency became the founding stone of many ope -as people colloquially refer to these urban developments-, including those in Caraballeda.
The founding president and emblematic face of the Opppe was architect Francisco Farruco Sesto Novas, who also served as Minister of Culture and Minister of State for the Urban Reconstruction of Caracas (2010-2013), the latter position that would later turn into the Ministry for the Revolutionary Transformation of Greater Caracas. Besides housing developments, the Opppe also erected the controversial new Mausoleum for El Libertador, Simón Bolívar, in the north-central area of the Venezuelan capital, and was entrusted with projects such as the bicentennial commemorative monument of April 19, a Plaza de la Revolución in the spaces of Bolívar Avenue, or the Bolívar Park on the grounds of La Carlota airbase, all in Caracas.
The Opppe 26 illustrated the prototype of an urban monolith in a Soviet style, reminiscent at times of the model of the Plattenbauten from East Germany. This massive popular housing project comprised 876 apartments distributed across 12 towers, each with 12 floors, according to official documents from the construction period. Considering a nuclear family convention of four members for the calculations, over 3,500 people lived in all those apartments. They were located in a highly seismic area, which with the 1967 earthquake was previously the scene of the disaster at the Mansion Charaima. Perhaps they were not fully aware of it, but the recent twin earthquake on June 24 provided a terrible reminder.
However, the collapse of the Opppe 26 towers was not the only residential complex of its kind that fell in the Central Coast due to the earthquakes. During a tour of the ground zero of destruction, Armando.Info confirmed that many of them were compromised; all, in fact, but to different extents.
A visual and direct count determined that out of the 43 Opppe towers, grouped in nine developments built by that presidential office between Playa Grande to the west and Tanaguarena to the east, 16 collapsed, or nearly four out of ten. The remaining 27 (63%) stood but with significant structural damages; some display a large spray-painted letter D on their facades, indicating in emergency jargon that they should be demolished.
Most of the urban developments in that area, 90% of them -Opppe 26, 27, 22, 30, 33, and 34-, were concentrated in Caraballeda. Two more in Tanaguarena -25 and 35- and one in Playa Grande. Together, according to official Opppe figures, they totaled 3,637 apartments, equivalent to over 14,500 people potentially affected by the earthquakes. A conservative figure considering that each 12-story tower had between 8 and 16 apartments per floor, according to several rescuers’ accounts on the ground.
The opes of the then Vargas state were built between 2011 and 2013 in a rush. This haste was evident in contracts assigned handpicked to companies with unknown experience in the construction industry, in the opacity of fund allocation, and in the dubious evaluation of the land where the developments were built, all factors that could have served as catalysts for a tragedy that was only just beginning to unfold.
‘Dignified’ housing, elections, and power
The Opppe was an office with presidential hierarchy that wielded power. A tangible sign of this was the location of its headquarters, on the third floor of the Palacio Blanco, across from the Palacio de Miraflores, during Hugo Chávez’s presidency.
It was the entity responsible for building the highest number of homes within the emergency plan of 2011-2012. It was assigned the construction of 11,188 out of a total of 33,476 houses, representing 33.4% of the total homes and apartments designated to address the emergency in the metropolitan area of Caracas.
Due to its efficiency, it quickly became a banner of the chavista management. Securing a roof was one of the most pressing concerns among the traditionally excluded population, not only for the victims of natural disasters. Beyond a just reparation, meeting that demand represented an enticing electoral lure.
With his hoarse voice, Farruco Sesto took on the role of entertainer during frequent special broadcasts on official TV channels. “Before the poor went to the edges, to the ravines, to risky places, and now they are coming to where the city is established, with its equipment, services, metro, schools, health facilities, museums, all conveniences,” he boasted in one such broadcast in 2012. In another that same year -the year Chávez’s cancer was revealed which would lead him to death in March 2013-, Sesto clarified, “the president does this with great love. He is with us; he sees this on TV. He wishes he could be at every handover. Ultimately, what matters is doing the job for our people, for families in difficulty.” This time, he announced that the Opppe was constructing 4,300 homes in Vargas.
The Central Coast was one of the epicenters of that construction and propaganda blitz. There, the Opppe was not just erecting buildings. For example, in 2012, Sesto attended the handover of “dignified housing,” houses built with the Forsa construction system, in the Los Corales sector of Caraballeda.
In January 2011, just three months after the emergency decree due to the rains, which was extended multiple times, the Opppe became a state foundation with its own assets and powers to manage funds, another demonstration of the power it was amassing and of which it never provided detailed reports.
According to the Memory and Accounts of the Office of the Presidency, to which the Opppe always responded until its recent deactivation in February 2026, between 2011 and 2015, the office managed a budget of nearly 3.3 billion dollars (exactly 3,273,625,727.15), based on calculations made from the official currency exchange rate of each of those years. But its execution does not appear itemized. In the accounts of 2011 and 2012, it merely reported that the substantial amounts were allocated to “contribute to the improvements and solutions of urban, architectural, and landscaping issues at a national level.” Beginning in 2013, they didn’t even bother to mention any specific project.
During that five-year period, 2012 was the year of greatest prosperity for the Opppe’s coffers. It had a budget of about 1.2 billion dollars (the figure: 1,169,517,397.90). No wonder it was an election year, where, in October, a Chávez, already near death, managed to get re-elected against opposition candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski. Another detail from that electoral sprint appears in the documents of the Ministry of the Presidency: just in 2012, the Opppe handed over 2,306 homes in Vargas (now La Guaira) and 240 in Caracas.
Inadvertent Blunders
At the end of 2021, Sesto -removed from the Opppe six years prior- participated in a meeting in Madrid with Mario Isea, then ambassador of Venezuela in Spain, to showcase the benefits of the Great Housing Mission Venezuela to a group of Spanish members of the so-called Platform of Affected by Mortgages of Madrid and Leganés. In front of the audience, Sesto admitted: “We didn’t do soil studies. We were in a hurry to hand over the homes,” according to the event report published by the digital medium Al Navío.
According to a 2023 report published in the Colombian magazine Ciudades, Estado y Política, during a series of debates that took place in 2013 and 2015 at Caracas’ National Museum of Architecture (Musarq) and the state oil company Pdvsa, architect Lucas Pou Ruán, lifelong partner of Farruco Sesto, reportedly stated that “at that time of crisis [referring to 2011], we had to start designing projects without determined lands or urban variables, while the process of land selection, occupation, and expropriation of vacant lots or sites with easily demolishable temporary installations developed in parallel. The first buildings were dictated by the nature of the emergency, they are very simple, but have the necessary living conditions to inhabit well.” Another review on those debates described as “forced march” the circumstances in which Opppe officials tackled their vast mission.
Pou Ruán built a career at the Opppe. He first served from 2010 as Project Execution Coordinator. Then, in February 2011, he was appointed Director of Project Execution and soon after as Director of Projects, until he reached his last position in 2012 as Director of Architecture of the agency, a responsibility he held until 2014.
In a telephone interview with Armando.info, Pou defended the management of the Opppe, dismissing that urgency affected their works. “That is a job that was done in two years,” he asserted. “The interpretation of the rush has nothing to do with the work one does. What do I mean? That all the work is done under absolutely responsible professional conditions. In other words, in a process like this, fast or slow, it doesn’t matter, what is necessary is that we never, ever, overlooked what are [sic] professional steps: projects, calculations, soil studies, I mean, because you have to do everything that needs doing.” Concerning reports that cite him about the speed of the works, he denied using such words: “I didn’t say that (…) that’s speculation.”
When asked if the Opppe’s projects in Vargas received any special consideration due to their development in a seismic zone, he responded rather generically: “There was a unit, let’s say, that directed soil studies, had some capacity to produce their soil studies, but basically, companies specialized in soil studies were contracted, and they were responsible for profiling the soil characteristics and later providing that information to specialized companies regarding the execution of pilings [foundations].”
The vagueness of his answer likely stemmed from the fact that, by his own decision, he did not wish to get involved in contracting and project management: “I said ‘I don’t want, I don’t want to be involved with contracts, I don’t want to deal with this, I don’t want to.’ Well, for reasons related to focusing on what I like to do, which is projecting.” While admitting that he had direct involvement in the Opppe building complex in Montalbán, another in Santa Mónica, and the Mausoleum of El Libertador, all in the metropolitan area of Caracas, he specifies that not a single one of the housing construction projects in Vargas passed through his hands: “When I arrived at the Opppe, those projects were already prototypes, already designed.” He then recalls that the person responsible for the housing projects of the Opppe, both in Vargas and Caracas, was Gilberto José Rodríguez González, Projects Director and Strategies Director of the Opppe from 2010 to 2014. Armando.info attempted to contact Rodríguez González through his social media and email, receiving no response.
A request for an interview was also sent to Francisco Farruco Sesto, both through his personal email and social media, but by the time of this publication no response was obtained from him.
In any case, a public balance of his management that Sesto wrote with satisfaction on his personal blog in August 2015, upon leaving the presidency of the Opppe, stated: “I must say that the Presidential Office, in the specific tasks assigned to it, responded to the Commander with loyalty and efficiency. Only in Caracas and Vargas, starting in 2011, without having projects or organization to execute so much work when we began, we undertook the construction of 11,199 homes, of which we managed to deliver about 9,500, with the rest in very advanced conditions.”
Much earlier than the double seismic event on June 24, 2026, several residents of the Opppe urbanizations in Vargas had reported vulnerabilities in the structures. Credito: La Verdad de Vargas
Illustrious Unknowns
In 2012, at the end of the presidential emergency decree’s validity, the Opppe continued building homes in La Guaira. In January 2014, Ernesto Villegas, now president of the presidential office – he came from being the Minister of Communication and Information who provided the official Versions on Hugo Chávez’s agony – visited the coastal state to review the progress of the works in the Opppe 34, Opppe 33, and Opppe 22 urbanizations in Caraballeda, which 12 years later were in ruins or uninhabitable. According to the press release, during the visit, Villegas “mixed the cement and shared with the workers, architects, engineers, and inspectors” whom he would have demanded to speed up “the construction of the homes,” while urging inspectors to maintain permanent oversight of the works.
As late as 2016, the presidential construction office was still handing over apartments in the L building of Opppe 26, one of the last towers to be built. It would no longer be up to Farruco Sesto but to the now-deceased former governor of Vargas, General Jorge García Carneiro, to deliver 46 apartments: “This is the Great Housing Mission Venezuela that President Chávez, with love and enthusiasm, wanted to give to the people [to those] to whom this need was denied for a long time, and thanks to the continuity of President Maduro, we can say that we are going to enjoy a home,” he stated then.
Armando.Info tried to obtain Villegas’s version regarding his management period at the Opppe, without success. A request for an interview was also sent to Orlando José Martínez Santana, who served as Director of Works Execution at the Opppe from 2011 to 2014 and who also appears as an institutional contact in two service projects in La Guaira assigned to the companies Kema Proyectos y Construcciones (inspections) and Servicios Integrales LCH C.A (construction of the pilings for Opppe 34); he also did not respond to messages sent to his emails and social media or to phone calls.
Finally, the Opppe was dissolved in February 2026, now under the interim government of Delcy Rodríguez. Transparency Venezuela alerted that the budget assigned to the Opppe would be transferred to the state corporation Juntos Todo es Posible. As always, there was no official information on the total amount.
Despite the dissolution of the Opppe, the agency left a trail of the capricious and opaque contracts that it had become accustomed to granting during its tenure.
Under the emergency decree due to the impact of the rains and under Article 102 of the Public Procurement Law, the call for public tenders for the execution of works, provision of services, and acquisition of goods was suspended. Assignments often benefited unknown companies with little verifiable experience in the construction sector.
A review conducted by Armando.info of the National Contractors Registry (RNC) found that 84 companies undertook 163 contracts for works and services granted by the Opppe during those pioneering and prosperous years of 2011-2012. Out of that total, 17 contractors executed 23 projects directly related to the construction and inspection of residential buildings of the Opppe in Vargas state.
Within this group of companies, some patterns draw attention: 11 of the 17 companies that were awarded contracts in Vargas (65%) were created or significantly increased their capital between 2011 and 2012; eight (47%) registered their addresses outside Caracas and Vargas, in states as distant as Barinas, Táchira, or Anzoátegui, while the registered social object in five companies’ (29%) files is entirely unrelated to the construction sector.
An example that encompasses all these remarkable characteristics is the Asociación Cooperativa Portuguesa Vencedora 2012 RL, based in Barinas state. It was established in June 2011, just the year the presidential emergency decree went into effect that facilitated express contracting for building homes for disaster victims.
The RNC indicates that in October 2012, the Opppe awarded Portuguesa Vencedora a large-scale contract -indeed, disproportionate for its short history- CJ.OPPPE-115/12, Construction of developments in the implementation of projects Opppe 25A, Opppe 25B, and Opppe 25C, in what is now La Guaira state. Additionally, they signed two contracts for constructing housing units for Opppe located in Caracas.
Also in 2012, that cooperative participated in the III Meeting of Supply and Demand for goods, works, and services for SMEs and communal enterprises, coordinated by the Ministries of Commerce and Industry and the National Procurement Service (SNC).
Another remarkable case is that of Inversiones Rotatech C.A., a company registered in Caracas in July 2011, which, according to the RNC, signed two contracts for the “construction of pilings for the multifamily housing development” of Opppe 34 and Opppe 26, two urban projects that collapsed in Caraballeda. To execute these works, in April and May 2012, Inversiones Rotatech subcontracted to Servicios Integrales LCH C.A., a company qualified for state contracting that, while established in May 2007, increased its capital and modified its business purpose in June 2011.
Inversiones Rotatech itself is not listed in the RNC as a company registered to contract with the Venezuelan state; nor is its majority shareholder, P&P Consejeros C.A. But one of its partners, Oscar Timpanaro Marcoccia, is an executive -but not a shareholder- of another similarly named company, Rotatech Fundaciones C.A., which is listed in the RNC and thus remains eligible to contract with the state.
Armando.info tried to contact the owners of Asociación Cooperativa Portuguesa Vencedora 2012 RL and Inversiones Rotatech C.A., both currently inactive firms that do not have websites or Instagram accounts. The phone numbers listed in the records of both companies in the RNC do not work, and the emails sent received no reply.
Other remote contractors included L.C. Ingeniería, C.A., based in Guanare, the capital of Portuguesa state, which served as the resident company in the inspection of 672 apartments in Naiguatá; and Pavimentos del Sur, C.A., from San Cristóbal, Táchira state, awarded contracts by the Opppe, not as inspectors but as constructors of a building that is unspecified in the RNC, despite the fact that its business purpose does not mention construction as an area of action. An email was sent to its partner, Juan Carlos Uzcátegui Serrano, regarding this matter. Communication could not be established.
From Anzoátegui state, Construcciones Inversiones Israel Andrade (Coniad), C.A. was commissioned through a contract to build 96 apartments of building Opppe 36/B. There was also no response to the interview request sent to its partner, Alirio Morillo.
Other apparent anomalies are evident in the RNC files. For instance, Grupo Gaiga 777, C.A. registered in Caracas, did not explicitly have construction in its fiscal purpose, but rather the elaboration of architecture, engineering, and construction projects. However, according to the contract assigned to it by the Opppe, the company was responsible not only for the project but also for the construction of 145 apartments in the Naiguatá Boulevard. The building it raised, claimed to be 99% complete, was never specified.
The contractor was fragile nonetheless. Just a couple of years later, the RNC banned contracting with this company due to the start of an administrative procedure against it after it was sued for owing social benefits. Attempts were made to contact its director and partner, César Molina Rodríguez, without receiving a reply.
As specified in the RNC, Construcciones e Importaciones I&D, C.A. was responsible for completing “works” on four floors (ground floor and one, two, and seven) of an unidentified tower of the Opppe in Vargas/La Guaira. The discordance lies in the business purpose, which never details construction as the company’s goal, but rather the commercialization of materials and hardware items, materials, items, and construction machinery. Additionally, it is attributed for “soil studies, structural calculations, and analysis of projects related to civil engineering.”
An inspector architect, who worked for a private company that provided services to the Opppe in Caracas, recalls some irregularities like the time of execution of the buildings. “Something of that magnitude isn’t finished in a year and a half. A building can naturally take a bit longer than two years. Up to three years: that’s a healthy time for a work,” recalls the professional, whose identity is kept confidential. Although he wasn’t involved in the works in La Guaira, he focuses his criticism on the little attention to the specific characteristics of the Central Coast’s land. “The soil in Vargas requires a specialized study (…) La Guaira has a lot of sediment created by landslides and is not solid ground for constructing. There, only buildings of two or three stories could be built,” he stated, adding another detail: “The Covenin standard says that in Vargas, only portico-type structures can be made, that is, with columns and beams connected with rigidity.”
Villas and Sand Castles
The towers of Opppe 26, 27, 22, 33, and 34 were erected in the Caribe sector, one of the most sought-after areas of Caraballeda. The simply designed buildings, meant for low-income individuals, were neighbors with luxurious condos, some designed by architectural firms, which also succumbed to the power of the double seismic event, an extraordinary phenomenon that exposed all constructions to extreme stress.
The buildings of the Great Housing Mission Venezuela were also close to the iconic marina of Caraballeda and the Nautical Club, where boats and yachts are still tied up at its dock. Across from it still stands the historic Macuto Sheraton Hotel, undergoing incomplete renovations after being nationalized and renamed Hotel Guaicamacuto. If the work stoppage already suggested it might become a white elephant, the pair of earthquakes seem to condemn it to obscurity.
In February 2011, the land where the Opppe towers in Vargas were built had been “recovered,” a euphemism that Farruco Sesto used to refer to the summary expropriations of privately owned land.
In the adjacent Tanaguarena, on the eastern tip of the Opppe beach developments, the Opppe 25 complex was also affected. From José María España avenue, the enormous hollow volume gathering five towers can be seen. Behind it lie the ruins of what were two more towers, from a total of seven this development housed. As of July 10, when Armando.info took the tour, approximately 70 bodies had been recovered from there, and the search continued for another 100 under the rubble, as confirmed by Esteban Chala, leader of the Evacuation and First Aid Corps (CEPA) from Argentina, one of the many international search and rescue teams that arrived in Venezuela for the emergency. The Argentine unit focused on locating and extracting people, alive and deceased. Nearby, dozens of individuals waited under the trees’ shade for the discovery and recovery of their loved ones’ remains.
Something more isolated and solitary, facing Ali Babá beach in Camurí Chico, are the remains of what was the Opppe 30 complex, which encompassed two interconnected towers along José María España avenue, keeping its erstwhile inhabitants, now disaster victims, in makeshift tents, guarding that, once night falls, no one steals the few belongings remaining in their cracked apartments.
Outside the ground zero area, Armando.Info verified in Playa Grande -another area battered by the earthquakes- that the Opppe 36, renamed Luisa Cáceres de Arismendi, across from the Hugo Chavez development, suffered severe damage. One of the four towers collapsed while the other three barely stood, with structural breaks that exposed them to the risk of collapse.
After the double earthquake on St. John’s Day, José Luis Blanco arrived in the Central Coast as soon as he could from San Rafael de Onoto in Portuguesa state, to settle with dozens of people in front of the crumbled tower of Opppe 22. He holds onto the hope of recovering his brother’s body, who had worked as a bricklayer. “In the family, we always told him to return to his hometown, but he fell in love with La Guaira. He was very happy here, living in front of the sea. Now everything is dust; these government buildings were poorly constructed, with useless materials. And no one from them has come to help us,” he comments quietly in the small square where most of the Opppe projects in Caraballeda converge. Behind him, a small altar to the Virgin of Fatima remains intact, still standing.
* Valentina Lares collaborated in the reporting.
** The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) provided documents and contacts for this story.