Electricity was restored in Venezuela on Saturday, after a general outage of more than 12 hours, attributed by the government to “sabotage” by the opposition a month after the contested re-election of Nicolas Maduro.
A power outage occurred at the Simón Bolívar hydroelectric plant, the country’s largest, on Friday morning, leaving the entire country in the dark, reviving the spectre of the massive blackout in 2019 that lasted five days.
“We are normalizing, regularizing, step by step with guarantees, with security,” Maduro said on television on Friday evening, without giving precise figures on the cuts or the state of network recovery.
“It is an attack full of vengeance, of hatred, which comes from fascist currents […] claiming to be the political opposition,” he said, adding that he was convinced that it was organized from the “United States.”
Power began to return to some states on Friday and was restored to most of the country by Saturday morning, according to local media and users contacted by AFP.
However, difficulties persisted in Andean states such as Mérida and Táchira, or in their neighbors of Lara and Zulia in the west, as well as in Bolívar in the south, regions usually affected by power cuts.
“In Michelena (Tachira), the power came back on around midnight, it had come back on earlier in the afternoon, but it had gone off again and [depuis] “He didn’t leave,” Thais Hernández, a 29-year-old dentist, told AFP.
The NGO VE Sin Filtro, which measures the level of internet connectivity in the country affected by the outage, reported connectivity of 92.7% at dawn on Saturday.
Caracas metro service has also been fully restored, according to transportation authorities.
According to Jose Aquilar, an expert on electrical networks, the outage could be the result of a “failure” that “should not have gotten worse, but the precariousness of the Venezuelan electrical system is such that one thing leads to another,” he told AFP.
For Victor Poleo, former deputy minister of Electricity, it was “probably an atmospheric discharge” whose protection systems “broke down” due to a lack of “maintenance and replacement” of equipment.
The widespread outages came as Venezuela is embroiled in a severe post-election crisis following the July 28 presidential election, with the opposition claiming victory over Nicolas Maduro.
The country regularly experiences localized power outages and load shedding but rarely widespread cuts.
The government regularly attributes these incidents to “attacks” orchestrated by the United States and the opposition in order to overthrow it.
However, the opposition and many specialists believe that these recurring cuts are the result of poor management of the industrial sector, which has deteriorated with the economic crisis.