Photo: Pedro Rances Mattey Agence France-Presse Power began to return to some states on Friday and was back on in most of the country by Saturday morning.
Agence France-Presse in Caracas
Posted at 8:35 p.m.
- Americas
Power was restored in Venezuela on Saturday, after a widespread outage lasting more than 12 hours, which the government attributed to “sabotage” by the opposition a month after the disputed re-election of Nicolas Maduro.
A blackout occurred at the Simón Bolívar hydroelectric plant, the country’s largest, on Friday morning. The entire country was left 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,” Mr. Maduro said on television on Friday evening, without however giving precise figures on the cuts or on 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, saying he was convinced that it was organized from the “United States.”
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Electricity began to return to some states on Friday and was back on in most of the country by Saturday morning, according to local media and users contacted by AFP.
However, problems 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.
“In Michelena (Táchira), the power came back around midnight, it had come back earlier in the afternoon, but it had gone back on and [since then] it has not come back on,” Thais Hernández, a 29-year-old dentist, told AFP.
The NGO VE Sin Filtro, which measures the level of connectivity Internet connectivity in the country affected by the outage reported 92.7 percent connectivity as of 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 electrical energy, 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 serious post-election crisis After the presidential election of July 28, the opposition claimed victory over Nicolas Maduro.
The country regularly experiences localized power outages and load shedding, but rarely widespread blackouts.
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 blackouts are the result of poor management of the industrial sector, which has deteriorated with the economic crisis.