Socialism Dies in the Darkness By Richard Fernandez
https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/socialism-dies-in-the-darkness/
“A major power outage hit crisis-stricken Venezuela on Thursday, according to Reuters … a problem the government of President Nicolas Maduro quickly blamed on ‘sabotage’ at a hydroelectric dam that provides much of the country’s power.” National life ground to a standstill, telecommunications — including the Internet — stopped working, hospitals were plunged into darkness and cities of millions lay helpless without electricity.
As the outage continued into Friday spreading to every Venezuelan state, it became clear this was going to become the biggest of all blackouts yet and Maduro’s officials increasingly pointed a finger at the United States. But the national electric grid had also been teetering for a long time. “Crumbling infrastructure and lack of investments have hit Venezuela’s power supply for years.” Outages had become a way of life and there was no easy way of proving this wasn’t ‘sabotage’ but only more of the same dysfunction.
The government has blamed the outages on a variety of things — including pesky animals. In an Oct. 20 tweet, Energy Minister Luis Motta Dominguez named “rats, mice, snakes, cats, squirrels” as possible culprits in shorting out lines. He added: “In the list of animals mentioned above, of course iguanas are included.”
Critics, however, say insufficient investment by the government is the cause, following the 2007 nationalization of the electricity sector.
There was nevertheless circumstantial evidence for deliberate human action. For one thing Maduro himself had long been embarked in cyberattacks against his political enemies. “Twitter image and video servers and platform backends have been blocked in Venezuela from 3:10 PM UTC on state provider CANTV (AS8048) and its mobile network Movistar, as interim leader Juan Guaidó is set to arrive in Caracas after a tour of neighboring countries. The restrictions have been implemented as the leader calls supporters to the streets under the hashtags #4MVzlaALaCalle, #VamosVzla and #VamosJuntosALaCalle,” according to Netblocks, a site which monitors network suppression throughout the world.
Maduro had been suppressing opposition YouTube channels also. “YouTube has been restricted by Venezuela’s state-run internet provider CANTV (AS8048) for over twenty hours, according to current network measurements from the NetBlocks internet observatory. Incident timings indicate a start time coinciding with live broadcasts from the country’s National Assembly on Wednesday.” CONTINUE AT SITE
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