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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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Today in Focus · Searching for earthquake survivors in Venezuela · 7 Jul 2026 podcast

We have seen military deployed and Marines and several large ships.

naval boats in the port.

So there has been a significant US response and I think there really needs to be because after everything that happened on the 3rd of January, the US effectively took responsibility of Venezuela and is obviously keen to profit from Venezuela's massive oil reserves.

So if it does nothing now to help a country that many have described as a sort of neo-colony or a US protectorate, it will not look good for the Trump administration.

You do see US search teams moving around and they are part of this massive international response with search teams from Chile, El Salvador, Brazil, the UK, other parts of Europe that is now unfolding.

I think it will probably be a long time before we understand the full scale of what has happened just because these collapsed buildings are so complex and the machinery is not there.

And the devastation is just on such a great scale.

I mean, it's just kilometre after kilometre of rubble and wreckage and ruins.

that it will take a long time to work out how many people were inside these big buildings.

And many people, of course, even the survivors are now sleeping out on the streets because their buildings were so badly damaged that they dare not go back inside.

So when you're driving through the dark streets of Laguada at night, you see tents on street corners and you see people who've moved into effectively refugee camps that have been set up by the UN, camps for displaced people.

And their future is very uncertain.

I don't think we have any clue where they will be housed or what will be done to support them.

It is a hell of a job to support a country that was already in real dire straits beforehand.

And the political future, I think, looks equally uncertain because...

On one level, this natural disaster could help prolong the life of Del Cid Rodriguez's government because it is almost certainly going to postpone all of the talk of holding elections.

But at the same time, the anger and the rage and the potential for public disorder

is really risen.

And I think many, many, many, many people here already despised the government for everything that has happened in Venezuela over the past 25 years plus.

And now I think that is likely to be intensified even further.

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