Caracas Chronicles

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.

The new outage has resulted in queues for gasoline outside Caracas. But, unlike 2019, many hospitals and commercial spots in urban areas continue to function through diesel-based power generators that sprinkled throughout the country following the nationwide blackout five years ago. The many businesses and buildings without their own power generators remain in darkness.

In Chacao, an affluent sector of Caracas, there was a strange sense of normalcy during the blackout: “Most shops are open, with people only using cash” explains a journalist based in Caracas, “It feels like a national blackout during political turmoil isn’t so bad the second time around. We found solutions for this problem the first time: have cash at hand, have water, know where to access phone data, be careful when crossing the street, use buses, and know that if you want to talk to someone, you have to go over there to see them.”

In fact, power has been returning intermittently to some areas of Caracas, Nueva Esparta and the Andean states. According to VE Sin Filtro, Nueva Esparta, Mérida and Táchira have recovered power over 50%. Meanwhile, in the rest of the states including Caracas, the connectivity rate is around 2.2 to 25% of the usual level. Indeed, communications are battered in Venezuela.

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.”

Nevertheless, the nationwide blackout in Venezuela may feed the discontent following the July 28th stolen elections. Since the morning, a picture has been doing rounds on social media: it shows the monumental Cuartel de la Montaña, where the remains of Hugo Chávez lay, brightly lit at dawn over the darkened shantytowns below. 

Uh-Ah.