Power was gradually returning to Venezuela on Friday after a nationwide blackout that authorities blamed on sabotage of the national electrical grid.
The nation experiences frequent blackouts, although rarely on such a large scale, which Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s government routinely attributes to conspiracies to overthrow him.
Authorities reported the outage across 24 states began shortly before dawn, but by late afternoon correspondents reported power began to return to parts of Caracas, the southwestern state of Tachira and western Merida.
Photo: Reuters
“We are normalizing, regularizing, step by step,” Maduro said on television on Friday evening, without specifying the extent of the outages or recovery.
“This is an attack full of vengeance, full of hatred, coming from fascist currents relying on political sectors pretending to be the political opposition,” he said, alleging US involvement.
Earlier, Venezuelan Minister of Communications Freddy Nanez reported “an electrical sabotage ... which has affected almost the entire national territory.”
Opposition leaders and experts reject the Maduro government’s conspiracy claims, instead blaming corruption and a lack of investment and expertise for the outages. The worst countrywide outage to strike Venezuela, in March 2019, lasted several days.
“It’s complicated to get around without electricity. We don’t know what’s going to happen during the day,” said Anyismar Aldana, a 27-year-old cashier on her way to work in Caracas.
When the power goes out “we don’t work, we don’t know what to do for food,” Aldana said.
Western regions such as Tachira and Zulia have daily power outages.
“We woke up to the blackout,” said Carlos Pena, 39, owner of a small chicken shop in the center of Caracas who went to work to “see if we can sell everything so that it doesn’t go to waste.”
Nanez said the government had put in place “anti-coup protocols” after the blackout, citing the recent July 28 election — the result of which has been widely disputed.
Maduro was proclaimed the winner, but the Venezuelan National Electoral Council has refused to release detailed data to verify the result.
The opposition says its candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, won the election by a landslide, releasing polling station-level data to back up that claim.
Gonzalez Urrutia on Friday ignored a third summons to appear before prosecutors over his claims he was the rightful winner of the vote.
Prosecutors said if he failed to appear an arrest warrant would be issued.
Gonzalez Urrutia is accused of “usurpation of functions” and “forgery” for the opposition’s release of electoral results data.
The opposition candidate has accused Venezuelan Attorney-General Tarek William Saab of pursuing politically motivated charges and of not providing “guarantees of independence and due process.”
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
Two former Chilean ministers are among four candidates competing this weekend for the presidential nomination of the left ahead of November elections dominated by rising levels of violent crime. More than 15 million voters are eligible to choose today between former minister of labor Jeannette Jara, former minister of the interior Carolina Toha and two members of parliament, Gonzalo Winter and Jaime Mulet, to represent the left against a resurgent right. The primary is open to members of the parties within Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s ruling left-wing coalition and other voters who are not affiliated with specific parties. A recent poll by the
TENSIONS HIGH: For more than half a year, students have organized protests around the country, while the Serbian presaident said they are part of a foreign plot About 140,000 protesters rallied in Belgrade, the largest turnout over the past few months, as student-led demonstrations mount pressure on the populist government to call early elections. The rally was one of the largest in more than half a year student-led actions, which began in November last year after the roof of a train station collapsed in the northern city of Novi Sad, killing 16 people — a tragedy widely blamed on entrenched corruption. On Saturday, a sea of protesters filled Belgrade’s largest square and poured into several surrounding streets. The independent protest monitor Archive of Public Gatherings estimated the
Irish-language rap group Kneecap on Saturday gave an impassioned performance for tens of thousands of fans at the Glastonbury Festival despite criticism by British politicians and a terror charge for one of the trio. Liam Og O hAnnaidh, who performs under the stage name Mo Chara, has been charged under the UK’s Terrorism Act with supporting a proscribed organization for allegedly waving a Hezbollah flag at a concert in London in November last year. The rapper, who was charged under the anglicized version of his name, Liam O’Hanna, is on unconditional bail before a further court hearing in August. “Glastonbury,
RSS