(Bloomberg) — Power is being restored in Venezuela after a 12-hour blackout hit all 24 states Friday morning, President Nicolás Maduro said on state television.
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Authorities are investigating an alleged attack on the transmission systems of the Guri hydroelectric plant in southeastern Venezuela after the blackout, Maduro said. Measures taken after a previous attack in 2019 worked to protect Guri, the country’s main source of electricity, Maduro said.
According to earlier comments by Caracas Mayor Carmen Melendez, power had already been restored to all of Caracas when Maduro addressed the country.
When electricity returned to some parts of the capital on Friday afternoon, much of the country remained without power. The metro was still out of service and lines formed outside gas stations as Venezuelans braced for the worst.
The blackout came amid a weeks-long power struggle that saw opposition leader Edmundo González claim a landslide victory over Maduro. The electoral authority declared Maduro re-elected for a third consecutive term in July.
Earlier in the day, Maduro blamed the blackout on “desperate attacks by fascists” in his Telegram channel. Information Minister Freddy Ñañez said the government had activated its “anti-coup protocols” to combat “sabotage by far-right forces.”
Power outages worsened after 2019, when a massive blackout left Venezuela in the dark for nearly a week after years of state mismanagement and underfunding of its massive hydroelectric dams. Since then, state-enforced power rationing has been common, especially in rural areas outside Caracas.
Opposition leader González was summoned to the attorney general’s office for a third time on Friday for uploading voting data that appeared to show he had won a landslide in the July 28 presidential election. Neither González nor Attorney General Tarek William Saab confirmed whether his appearance had been postponed due to the power outage.
–With assistance from Andreina Itriago Acosta.
(Updates with Maduro comments from the first paragraph, Melendez comments in the third paragraph)
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