While electricity is slowly being restored across Venezuela on Friday, the government of President Nicolas Maduro distributed portable electric generators to keep hospitals, clinics and other essential facilities operating, as well as public places like markets.
Internet observatory page NetBlocks.org reported Friday afternoon: "Power is returning to parts of #Venezuela after 23 hours but new outages are slowing the recovery; data shows internet connectivity now at 20 percent up from 2 percent earlier today."
Venezuelan Vice President Dulcy Rodriguez pointed the finger firmly at Washington, which since January 23 has backed the self-proclaimed interim president of Venezuela, a parliamentarian named Juan Guaido, as the legitimate leader of the country, seeking Maduro's ouster. She noted that only three minutes after the blackout began, US Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) tweeted about it, gloating that the "Maduro regime is a complete disaster."
"The electric war announced and directed by US imperialism against our people will be defeated," Maduro said on Twitter, adding, "Nothing and no one will be able to defeat the people of Bolivar and Chavez. Maximum unity of the patriots!" Rodriguez also praised the country's electrical sector workers for restoring power as quickly as possible.
The site of the alleged attack was the Guri hydroelectric power station, a gigantic dam on the Caroni River in Orinoco state that produces 10,200 megawatts of power per day: 73 percent of the country's electrical needs. Guri is the world's third-largest hydroelectric dam.
Operated by the state-owned National Electric Power Corporation (Corpoelec), the dam was finished in 1986 and formed part of the government's strategy of maximizing fossil fuel exports by making the country minimally dependent on oil for producing electricity, according to Power Technology. However, under Maduro's predecessor, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the government tried to reduce this dependency on both hydroelectric power and oil exports, encouraging private homes and public structures such as shopping malls and government buildings to provide their own power sources.
Efforts accelerated in 2016 when a heavy drought saw reservoir levels drop precipitously low, prompting scheduled blackout times in several Venezuelan states, national paper El Nacional reported at the time.
"Guri has faced sabotage… It is a part of an electric war against the state. We will not allow this! We are working to restore power supply," Corpoelec tweeted on Thursday.
Chuck Kaufman, the national co-coordinator of the Alliance for Global Justice, told Radio Sputnik's Loud and Clear Friday that this could signal the beginning of a Nicaragua-style contra war in the country.
One is reminded of the Israeli-Egyptian War of Attrition that followed the 1967 Six-Day War. To humiliate and demoralize Egyptian forces, the Israel Defense Forces staged airborne attacks on power stations and other infrastructure in Egypt. The most notorious attack was Operation Shock in October 1968, when helicopter-borne Israeli troopers attacked and blew up a bridge, a dam and several power stations along the River Nile, plunging Cairo into darkness and forcing Egyptian President Gamel abd al-Nasser to call off attacks on Israeli fortifications near the Suez Canal.
Another example, cited by host John Kiriakou, was that of Iraq during the Persian Gulf conflict, during which the US repeatedly attacked Iraq's power stations. He noted the infamous phrase used by US Air Force general Curtis LeMay during the Vietnam War, when the US waged a similar campaign against the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi, in which LeMay said the US would "bomb them back to the Stone Age."
"A population can get worn down to where they think, ‘Well anything has to be better than what's happening to us now,'" Kaufman said. "It's a tried-and-true tactic. They don't usually try new tactics because they have a playbook that works for them."