New Blackout, New Sabotage (updated with yet another sabotage!)

A new national blackout yesterday at 1:20 pm left most of the country without electricity for several hours.

Midafternoon, Communications and Information Minister, Jorge Rodríguez claimed that the hydroelectric Guri dam had been attacked again, “the [electric] generation of the hydroelectric central Simón Bolívar at Guri was directly attacked,” he said.

However, also said Minister Rodríguez, different from the “attack” of March 7, this time the government was able to quickly recover: “It took us 5 or 6 days to recuperate the electric system from the first attack carried out by the right, today we have recovered within hours. (…) We had the capacity to rapidly respond and [electricity] has been restored completely.”

The power, in fact, was restored progressively in some regions during the afternoon, only to collapse again from 9:45 pm on.

(Update)

This morning, hours after the power went out again last night at 9:45, Minister Jorge Rodríguez claimed that the electric system had suffered a second attack. Yesterday the National Electric System, he said, “suffered two devious terrorist attacks by the hands of the violent [people] who have made the sowing of distress among the population their instrument to attain their destabilizing objectives.”

The first event (the blackout at 1:29 pm,) explained Rodríguez, had similar characteristics to the blackout of March 7, implying that again this time a cyberattack or a magnetic attack has been carried out. This time, however, the government had everything under control and in a few hours, according to Rodríguez, the distribution system was behaving in a “harmonious and robust” manner.

But at 9:47pm a more conventional sabotage was carried out to produce the second blackout: “criminal hands,” explained Rodríguez, “started a huge fire in the transition patio of Guri.”

The minister did not explain how the “criminal hands” were able to start a huge fire inside a secure installation, but he did describe the enemy in detail:

“An event of this nature has never before happened in the history of the Venezuelan Electric System, and it is evidence of the lack of limits of these terrorists, helped by the warmongering leadership that conform the military, financial, and media fabric of the supremacists in power today in the United States of America, and who aspire to rule the world.”

Rodríguez ended his declarations predicting victory: “We will defeat this electric war with the immense strength that, as a people, we have accumulated in our struggle against vulgar empires and their local lackeys.”