Rad Geek People's Daily

Around 4:40 am on Friday, a national power outage hit Venezuela. More than ten hours later, electricity is still out in most of the country. After a small surge, the average nationwide connectivity levels have fallen to 17.9% according to VE Sin Filtro, a digital rights watchdog of NGO Conexión Libre y Segura. The situation feels eerily similar to March 2019, when the country was plunged into darkness for a week amidst a political struggle for the presidency—traumatic days for many Venezuelans. While a short-timed outage had hit the country on Tuesday night, the reasons and geographic origin of this outage are not clear yet.

Yet, according to experts, it was a matter of time before another nationwide blackout in Venezuela following years of disrepair, lack of maintenance and investment that destroyed the power grid—alongside repressive management, terrible wages, and unsafe working conditions.

. . . Following a decade-and-a-half long Chavista tradition of blaming adversaries when facing power grid failures, Nicolás Maduro blamed the national power outage on a fascist attack. His Minister of Communications, Freddy Ñanez, had previously described it as an electric sabotage led by the opposition leaders María Corina Machado and Edmundo González. Diosdado Cabello, who is debuting as Minister of the Interior, also said that the culprits will face justice. González had been summoned for today, a third time this week, by General Prosecutor Tarek W. Saab as part of the case against the opposition’s dispute of the results. The summons threatened González if he tried to “run away” or obstruct justice.

Amidst the outage, Minister of Defense Vladimir Padrino López says that the Armed Forces are being deployed along the entire border of the national territory and they are in perfect civic-military and police union. Padrino said military tactical and non-tactical vehicles are being deployed to transport and mobilize citizens as part of Plan Centella.

— Caracas Chronicles, Another Nationwide Blackout In Venezuela
August 30, 2024

Que se vayan todos.

See also:

• GT 2023-07-24: Bolivarian Process (cont’d): There Is Not Enough Functioning Equipment To Convert The Gas Into Fuel
• GT 2019-03-07: Bolivarian Process (cont’d): 900
• GT 2017-07-08: Bolivarian Process (cont’d): Pro-government militias wielding wooden sticks and metal bars stormed congress on Wednesday