(Caracas) Electricity was restored in Venezuela on Saturday, after a general power outage of more than 12 hours, attributed by the government to “sabotage” by the opposition a month after the contested re-election of Nicolás Maduro.
A blackout occurred at the Simón Bolívar hydroelectric plant, the country’s largest, on Friday morning, leaving the entire country in darkness, 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 power outages or the state of the network’s 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 outages.
PHOTO ISAAC URRUTIA, REUTERS ARCHIVES
The power outage particularly affected the city of Maracaibo, Venezuela, on August 30, 2024.
“To Michelena [Táchira]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,” said Thais Hernández, a 29-year-old dentist.
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 power outage came as Venezuela is embroiled in a serious post-election crisis following the July 28 presidential election, with the opposition claiming victory for Nicolas Maduro.
The country regularly experiences localized power outages and load shedding, but rarely widespread power outages.
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 power outages are the result of poor management of the industrial sector, which has deteriorated with the economic crisis.
More than 700 detained protesters transferred to high-security prisons
“The Nicolás Maduro regime has transferred more than 700 political prisoners, arbitrarily detained after the presidential election of July 28 in police stations throughout the national territory and taken to the prisons of Tocuyito and Tocorón,” according to a statement from the OVP.
The people concerned were transferred on August 25, 27 and 30 at the cost of “numerous irregularities, even deception, because the relatives were not notified,” the NGO added.
Some 2,400 people have been arrested, including around 100 teenagers, during the protests against Mr Maduro’s re-election, the repression of which has also left 27 dead and 192 injured.
In early August, the president warned that he would send protesters to Tocorón and Tocuyito, two prisons in central Venezuela known to be run by criminal gangs.
“To date, none of the people transferred […] “she was not allowed to contact her family or appoint a trusted lawyer,” the Observatory said, and the authorities have not provided any information about them.
More than half of those arrested, 1,581, are considered “political prisoners” by the NGO Foro Penal, which defends people imprisoned for political reasons in Venezuela.