Tom Phillips
speaker
367 appearances
5 recordings
3 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 7 Jul
Tom Phillips’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
And he joined their team, put on an orange uniform and has been at the rock face on the front line of this, digging into these buildings.
helping them translate, trying to shout out instructions to people trapped in the rubble.
Just an incredible example of this amazing outpouring of Venezuelan solidarity, which
Venezuela, you are not alone.
Venezuela, you are not alone.
Venezuela, you are not alone.
But that is exactly how people feel.
They feel that they have been left to their own devices and to fend for themselves and that the government has not done enough.
And one suspects that that will have very major political consequences for this already very unpopular government.
The main criticism that you hear and the main frustration that you hear on every site that you visit, every destroyed building, is that in the hours and days following this disaster, when it was obvious to everyone in Venezuela and around the world that this was a massive, massive crisis, government search and rescue teams were simply not anywhere to be found.
People have not seen that.
They have been waiting by their wrecked buildings.
One of the biggest complaints is that the armed forces have not been present and people have not seen them.
And that when you do see a government presence, what you see and what we have seen as we've gone down to the worst affected areas are security forces with big guns, AK-47s, assault rifles, standing by the roadside, manning roadblocks, and apparently trying to control the political situation.
One of the volunteers that I met outside yet another destroyed building was Jesus, a young civil engineer who studied in the UK and had come to bring food to people who'd been displaced and the families of the victims.
One refrain that you hear constantly as you move around these broken buildings is more spades, fewer rifles.
And there is also frustration, as many see it, that the government has been standing in the way of volunteer groups getting about their work.
Asking for QR codes for people to come down to La Guaida, to the worst affected region.
I mean, I saw this firsthand.
I was trying to drive down there with my team and we were in a huge traffic jam, this convoy of trucks and lorries and bikes.
Showing 61–80 of 367 · page 4 of 19
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