Maduro’s announcement this weekend was years in the making.
“Since 2013 the grid has been in crisis, but the billons of dollars Maduro dedicated to it were largely pilfered,” David Smilde, a Venezuela expert at the Washington Office on Latin America human rights organization, told me. That partly explains why during a
2016 drought, for example, Maduro asked shopping malls and others to ration their power usage.
But a situation like this is unprecedented. “The only thing that prevented this from happening before is the economic contraction of the past several years,” Smilde continued. “Declining industry, declining consumption, and a declining population have reduced demand. But now the deterioration of the grid has caught up with that decline.”
And the deterioration is massive. “The whole power grid is barely generating between 5,500 and 6,000 megawatts, when it has the capacity to generate 34,000 megawatts,” Winton Cabas, the president of the Venezuelan association of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, told
AFP on April 1.
Those problems have exacerbated
humanitarian suffering in Venezuela.
About 70 percent of the country, including the capital, Caracas, is experiencing blackouts. It’s made hospitals struggle to treat patients or allow patients to give birth safely, and made it harder for Venezuelans to get food or water.
