Electricity returns across Venezuela after prolonged outage

Power was restored across Venezuela on Saturday morning, after a massive 12-hour outage plunged the entire country into darkness.

The government has blamed "sabotage" by opposition forces protesting what they say was fraud in the widely disputed elections a month ago that left President Nicolas Maduro in charge.

Blackouts are not uncommon in Venezuela -- though many experts attribute them to official corruption and a lack of investment in distribution networks.

This week's problem originated early Friday at the Simon Bolivar hydroelectric plant, Venezuela's chief source of power.

Maduro called it "the father and the mother of all attacks" against the facility. He accused "fascists," as he calls the opposition, and the United States of being behind the outage, but offered no evidence.

The prolonged power failure revived memories of a massive 2019 blackout that lasted several days.

Electricity began returning to some states around 4:00 pm (2000 GMT) Friday and had been restored to nearly the entire country by Saturday morning, according to local media and users contacted by AFP.

Metro service in Caracas was back to normal, transport authorities said.

Internet connectivity was around 93 percent by dawn Saturday, according to the NGO VE Sin Filtro, which monitors internet connection levels.

Jose Aquilar, an expert in risk in the electrical utilities sector, said the outage likely stemmed from a breakdown of some kind in the country's decrepit grid -- not sabotage.

"The failure should not have led to something major, but the Venezuelan electricity system is so precarious that one thing led to another," he told AFP, "and the distribution networks were affected."

- 'Full of revenge' -

The outage occurred a month after the July 28 elections, in which the government-aligned National Electoral Council (CNE) declared Maduro the winner, while refusing to release detailed data.

The opposition has published data from local election stations that it says shows Maduro was handily defeated by its candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia.

The United States and several Latin American and European countries have refused to recognize Maduro's victory claim without seeing detailed vote tallies.

The Caracas government had warned even before the election of a possible "attack" against the electrical system.

The outage, Maduro said Friday, was "an attack full of revenge... from fascist sectors."

Prosecutors had summoned Gonzalez Urrutia to appear Friday over his claims that he was the rightful winner of the election. He faces charges in connection with the opposition's release of electoral data.

Gonzalez Urrutia, who has said he fears arrest, is in hiding and did not appear. Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, similarly facing a threat of jail, is also in hiding.