Venezuela | Widespread power outage, government claims ‘sabotage’

(Caracas) A widespread power outage hit Venezuela on Friday, including its capital Caracas, with authorities blaming it on “sabotage” and an attempted coup, a month after Nicolas Maduro’s disputed re-election.

Some areas of Caracas began to receive power again in the morning, AFP journalists noted, with the government promising to normalize the situation as “soon as possible.”

Electricity has also partially returned to the states of Tachira (southwest) and Merida (west), AFP correspondents noted.

“At 4:50 a.m. on Friday, August 30, there was […] “A sabotage against the national electrical system that affected almost the entire territory, the 24 states report a total or partial loss of electricity supply,” announced the Minister of Communication Freddy Nanez on television.

The outage comes at a time when Venezuela has been plunged into a serious crisis since the July 28 presidential election, with the opposition claiming victory.

The country regularly experiences localized power outages and load shedding, but rarely a widespread outage. However, it was traumatized by a five-day outage in March 2019.

“Under control”

The government regularly attributes these breakdowns to “attacks” orchestrated by the United States and the opposition in order to overthrow it.

Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, often considered one of the most powerful men in Venezuela, was nevertheless reassuring: “the network is now starting to be supplied.”

“They (opposition supporters) have not achieved their goals […]that the country is on fire a month after the election, on the contrary, the country is in a (state of) complete calm,” he added.

“Everything is under control,” assured Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez. “The armed forces are deployed throughout the national territory,” he stressed.

However, the opposition and many specialists believe that the recurring power cuts are the result of poor management of the industrial sector, which has deteriorated with the economic crisis.

Venezuela has suffered an unprecedented 80% contraction in its GDP over the past decade, which the timid recovery of the last two years has not compensated for. Some seven million Venezuelans have fled their country.

“It’s complicated to move without electricity. We don’t know what’s going to happen,” says Anyismar Aldana, a 27-year-old cashier in Petare, a working-class neighborhood in the capital. “People are afraid it will happen again (like in 2019) […] We don’t work, we don’t know how to get food.”

Summons

On the political front, opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia was summoned for the third time by the prosecutor’s office on Friday morning.

It was not possible to know with the confusion generated by this breakdown if he had shown up. The prosecutor threatened him with an arrest warrant in case of another failure to show up.

Living in semi-clandestine mode, this 75-year-old former ambassador has not appeared in public since July 30. On Sunday, he said he feared justice “without guarantees of independence” and had not responded to other summonses.

The prosecution said it was investigating the opposition website which claimed he was the winner of the presidential election and accused him of “usurpation of functions” and “incitement to disobey the law”.

After the announcement of Nicolas Maduro’s re-election, spontaneous demonstrations left 27 dead and 192 injured, while some 2,400 people were arrested, according to official sources.

The socialist president, whose victory was validated by the Supreme Court, was declared the winner with 52% of the vote by the National Electoral Council (CNE), which did not, however, release the minutes of the polling stations, saying it was the victim of computer hacking.

Such an attack is considered implausible by the opposition, which has made public the vote count obtained by its scrutineers and which claims that Mr Gonzalez Urrutia won the election with more than 60% of the votes.