The United States said on Tuesday that it will evacuate its last few diplomats from its embassy in Caracas, as the electricity blackout in Venezuela enters its sixth day, making it the longest energy crisis in the nation’s history. Energy shortages are not new in Venezuela.
The oil-rich Latin American country of 31 million people suffered two disastrous nationwide blackouts in 2009 and a third one in 2016.
But the current blackout is quickly approaching the one-week mark and is believed to have caused a minimum of 20 deaths, mostly in hospitals around the country. The majority of the population currently lacks access to fuel and banking services, while there are disruptions in critical food and water supply lines. Several instances of mass looting have been reported across the nation since Monday.
The precise cause of the blackout remains unknown, though a number of experts point to a massive outage of the Simón Bolívar Hydroelectric Plant, located in northeastern Venezuela’s Necuima Canyon, as the root of the problem. Known also as the Guri dam, the facility generates more than four fifths of Venezuela’s electricity output, and may be responsible for the nationwide blackout.
The continuing crisis has exacerbated the already adversarial relationship between Washington and Caracas, as the Venezuelan government blames the US and the local opposition leader Juan Guaidó for the blackout. The government said on Monday that it would investigate Guaidó in connection with rumors of sabotage of the Guri dam facility. The announcement prompted the White House to warn that “a lot of countries would react very quickly” if Guaidó was incarcerated.
On Tuesday, Washington said that the remaining 20 members of staff of its embassy in the Venezuelan capital would be evacuated by Friday. Soon afterwards, the Venezuelan government said that it had ordered the American diplomats to leave the country, so that their presence there would not be used as a pretext by Washington to launch a military invasion of the country.
Meanwhile, the blackout continued as of Tuesday night, with experts warning that the aging infrastructure of Venezuela’s energy network, coupled with the lack of specialists on the ground, made it difficult to overcome the crisis.
The US-based Wired magazine explained on Tuesday that restoring the integrity of the energy grid following a large-scale blackout —a process known as a “black start”— will depend on being able to identify the root of the problem. But the absence of spare equipment and up-to-date monitoring software and hardware means that the Venezuelan state operator lacks the ability to visualize the grid and “understand the state of the system in real time”.
At the same time, supporters of the Venezuelan government accuse Washington of sabotaging its oil-export sector by refusing to buy Venezuelan oil and threatening to impose sanctions on foreign states that purchase oil from Venezuela. That, they say, has deprived the country of its main source of hard currency and is makes it exceedingly difficult for Caracas to sustain the nation’s energy and food-supply networks.
