Since 4:00 am on Friday, Venezuela has been experiencing a new nationwide power outage like in March 2019. While connectivity has recovered in certain areas, its nationwide average remains below 20% according to VE Sin Filtro.
In March 2019 Venezuela suffered a massive blackout that still had sequels in some cities in 2024. Three days without power. Back then, the government said it was sabotage, the same thing they are saying about today’s nationwide power outage. In those days the country was going through another institutional crisis after Maduro had won an election that was called without the participation of the legislature.
But the truth was that years of disrepair, lack of maintenance and investment destroyed the power grid—and also the repressive management, terrible wages, and unsafe working conditions.
And lets say that a huge corruption scheme that siphoned billions out of the power grid investment didn‘t help either. Here’s the explainer we published back then, it may explain why this is still happening. To the question “can it happen again?” The answer was: it will.
On the afternoon of March 7th, the power went off in all states. In many parts of the country, there has not been a minute of electricity since then to the noon of March 10th. Here is what we know of what could happen in a country that used to export electricity and still has the largest oil reserves on Earth.
