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.”
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