Photo: Collected
Power was gradually returning to Venezuela Friday after a nationwide blackout that authorities blamed on sabotage of the national electrical grid -- the latest crisis to hit the country after a disputed presidential election.
Venezuela experiences frequent blackouts, though rarely on such a large scale, which President Nicolas Maduro's government routinely attributes to unproven conspiracies to overthrow him.
Authorities reported the outage across 24 states began shortly before dawn, but by late afternoon AFP correspondents reported power began to return to parts of Caracas, the southwestern state of Tachira and western Merida.
"We are normalizing, regularizing, step by step," Maduro said on television Friday evening, without specifying the extent of the outages or recovery.
"This is an attack full of vengeance, full of hatred, coming from fascist currents relying on political sectors pretending to be the political opposition," he said, alleging US involvement.
Earlier, Communications Minister Freddy Nanez reported "an electrical sabotage... which has affected almost the entire national territory."
Opposition leaders and experts reject the Maduro government's conspiracy claims, instead blaming corruption and a lack of investment and expertise for the outages.
The worst countrywide outage to strike Venezuela, in March 2019, lasted several days.
"It's complicated to get around without electricity. We don't know what's going to happen during the day," said Anyismar Aldana, a 27-year-old cashier on her way to work in Caracas, in the working-class neighborhood of Petare.
When the power goes out "we don't work, we don't know what to do for food," she added.
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