After a statewide blackout that officials attributed to sabotage of the national electrical grid, power was progressively restored to Venezuela on Friday. This was the nation’s latest crisis following a contentious presidential election.
Blackouts are common in Venezuela, however not usually this widespread, which the administration of President Nicolas Maduro frequently blames on unsubstantiated plots to topple him.
Authorities said that the blackout, which affected 24 states, started just before daybreak. However, by late afternoon, AFP correspondents reported that power had started to come back to certain areas of Caracas, Tachira, a state in the southwest, and western Merida.
“We are normalizing, regularizing, step by step,” Maduro said on television 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.
Freddy Nanez, the minister of communications, earlier said that there was “an electrical sabotage… which has affected almost the entire national territory.”
The Maduro government’s conspiracy theories are rejected by opposition leaders and experts, who attribute the outages to corruption and a lack of funding and knowledge.
In March 2019, Venezuela had the worst nationwide outage that lasted for many 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, in the working-class neighborhood of Petare.
“We don’t work, we don’t know what to do for food,” she continued, when the electricity goes out.
