Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro has no plan to fix the blackout that has deepened the humanitarian crisis afflicting his country, his arch political rival warned.
“The regime at this hour, days after a blackout without precedent, has no diagnosis,” Juan Guaido, the top lawmaker President Trump and other Western leaders view as the interim president of Venezuela, said Sunday.
Venezuela suffered a widespread power outage on Thursday, with regime officials able to provide only intermittent relief, even to major cities such as Caracas, the nation’s capital. Maduro blamed the blackout on cyberattacks, but the United States is denying responsibility and echoing analysts who attribute the crisis to years of poor electrical grid maintenance.
“This is a multi-year decline in Venezuela,” Elliott Abrams, the State Department special envoy for Venezuela, told reporters Friday. “So the United States did not cause those problems, the international community did not; the regime caused those problems. The United States had nothing to do with the regime’s failure over a 10-year period to attend to the electric infrastructure of the country, for example.”
The blackout accelerated the nation’s descent into an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. Sen. Marco Rubio warned Thursday that Venezuelans would run out of food in “a handful of days” on Thursday — and that prediction was before the blackout, which has left those small stores to rot in warm refrigerators, and resulted in the deaths of dozens of babies who were receiving treatment in now-darkened hospitals.
“Report that at least 80 neonatal patients have died at University Hospital in Maracaibo, Zulia, since the blackout began on Thursday,” the Florida Republican added in a Sunday tweet. “Unimaginable tragedy. Heartbreaking.”
Guaido is convening an emergency session of the Venezuelan legislature on Monday, while the regime promises that the crisis will be resolved soon.
“The national electrical system has been subject to multiple cyberattacks,” Maduro tweeted, per Reuters. ”However, we are making huge efforts to restore stable and definitive supply in the coming hours.”
