March 12, 2019 - The Venezuelan constitutional president, Nicolás Maduro, once again accused the US government. to be responsible for the attack on the electricity supply, which caused a blackout throughout the country since last Thursday, March 7.

"They are behind this attack, because they believed that from this way they would achieve their political objectives," Maduro said Tuesday from the Presidential Command Post.

According to the president, the cyberattack was directed from two American cities: Houston and Chicago.

"We are facing some barbarians: the barbarian Donald Trump, the White House and their internal puppets who believe that politics has no limit," he said.

The president said that despite the threats, peace will prevail in Venezuela and that "no one will give a coup d'etat".
New relations with the United States

After the rupture of diplomatic relations between the US Venezuela and the 72-hour period that gave the US diplomatic staff to leave the country, Maduro announced his desire to have a respectful relationship with the White House in the future and left the doors open to a negotiation process between the two countries .

"I want the US to have an office of interests to attend to all its affairs in Caracas and I want Venezuela to have an office of interests in Washington," the president said after assuring that he believes in peace and diplomacy.

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Even though it had been 50 hours since the blackout started, Maracaibo was rather calm on the morning of Sunday, March 10th. People were talking, playing dominoes or getting together to cook all the meat they had so it wouldn’t rot, even amidst the uncertainty and the rumors that 80% of the country was in the dark.

Some grocery stores were giving away products such as plantain, vegetables or milk before they spoilt; others that had debit and credit card readers had huge lines; while others were already starting to sell anything in cash dollars: from flour and rice, to ice.

The calm ended late on Sunday afternoon with the first reports of lootings. The first stores targeted by the vandals were bakeries and small supermarkets; after that, they charged against the ice factories like Hielos El Toro, on Los Haticos Ave., looted after it started to sell bags of ice for up to $10. “The only thing we want is a small piece of ice to store my mom’s insulin, that’s all,” one of the protesters said.

On Monday morning, downtown Maracaibo became a battlefield until 3:00 p.m., where demonstrators faced security forces; the former with stones and bottles, the latter with pellets and tear gas. However, nobody was looting food there: people were taking toys and baby cradles.

Close to noon, Maracaibo mayor Willy Casanova told Radio Fe y Alegría that 80 people involved in vandalism had been arrested in the Maracaibo and San Francisco municipalities.

But the cherry on top of that day of intense lootings was the Nasa and Centro 99 supermarkets, two of the largest in Zulia’s capital, which people stripped completely clean, even in front of the National Police. Men, women and children, and even the elderly, loaded up with flour, pasta, soda or detergent. A person looting the Nasa supermarket, carrying a few full bags, told me: “The police is there but I told them, straight up: we’re all hungry, even you.”

It all started with a lie. A lie organized by the State and broadcasted on prime time TV, using precisely the weapons Luis Carlos Díaz has been warned about for years.

As the lie would have it, Luis Carlos and Nelson Bocaranda knew about the looming nationwide blackout.

Nelson, a TV, radio, press and now online investigative journalism veteran, is one of the highest-profile journalists in the country. He was the only source of reliable information on the Chávez terminal illness for months, while the Maduro regime kept telling the nation that the Comandante was recovering.

Luis Carlos is a cyber activist, radio journalist and occasional Caracas Chronicles contributor who started working on new media and freedom of speech at the communications journal SIC, and then developed an international profile as a multi-channel writer and speaker on Internet-users’ rights and online journalism.

This lie was stitched out of their words, maliciously edited and tendentiously re-ordered, on a clip designed to deceive:

This video, distributed on March 8th, claims that Luis Carlos and Nelson were aware the blackout was coming, just like US Senator Marco Rubio (the official culprit, according to the regime) and caretaker president Juan Guaidó.

Actually, Luis Carlos and Nelson were talking about the possibility of a communications blackout, organized by Russian and Chinese hackers to wipe out all chances of reporting what is happening in Venezuela. But the video, which is consistent with previous propaganda attacks against Luis Carlos, clumsily edited their words to suggest they had foreseen the power blackout just before it started, on Thursday afternoon.

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March 11, 2019 - The President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, reported that some subjects were caught in flagrante delicto when they tried to commit new attacks at the Simón Bolívar Hydroelectric Power Plant.

"We captured two individuals trying to sabotage El Guri's communication system. (...) I ask that the Venezuelan justice go for the intellectual authors of this gigantic damage that they have done to our people," he said.

The National President asserted that with these actions perpetrated by the empire's orders, there have been serious violations of the human rights of the Venezuelan people, for which he claimed justice.

"Venezuela is perhaps the first country in the world that has been a victim of US technology for cyber attack against an electrical system," he said.

In addition, he said that the attack was generated in three ways:

* Cybernetics, in the brain of El Guri reservoir and in Caracas.

* Electromagnetic, with which the recovery achieved was knocked down.

* Physical, with the burning of substations and electrical stations.

The dignitary expressed his admiration for the gallantry and courage with which the Venezuelan people have faced this situation.

In addition he praised the patience and the capacity of understanding demonstrated in the last days by the citizenship.

11-03-19.-The national blackout suffered by the city of Caracas and several states of the country has complicated the distribution of water in the capital

Through social networks and neighborhood groups runs the information that there will be no water in Caracas because Hidrocapital's pumping systems do not have enough electricity to operate. In several communities the liquid does not arrive and the inhabitants have run out of reserves.

https://twitter.com/ElPitazoTV/status/1105149484785434625
Translation: #Caracas | Police officials warned the public that they are taking water from the Guaire River, which is not suitable for consumption, and helped cross the highway to those who ignored the communiqué #11Mar -via @ genesiscs http: // elpitazo.net

In the capital there are direct water intakes in Cota Mil, from Ávila, where very long queues have been organized to collect in bottles and other containers.

Through images and videos published on the networks, it has been possible to confirm that people are being supplied with water in the falls of streams that flow into the reversions of the Guaire River. They are not sewage, but they are not potable either.

10-03-19.-The Minister of Communication and Information, Jorge Rodríguez, reported that work and school activities are suspended on Monday, after the blackout that has no light throughout the national territory, since Thursday.

"Labor and school activities are suspended at all levels of education from pre-school to university education, and is reported in the course of the minutes," he said during a broadcast on VTV.

Rodriguez reiterated that the Government continues to work to restore electricity service.

The government attributed the national blackout to a "cyber attack" sponsored by the United States (USA).

This situation has been affected by hospitals that do not have the power plants and the result of the death of 18 people, according to the opposition parliamentarian, José Manuel Olivares.

03-10-19.-Inhabitants of the San Antonio sector, in Barquisimeto, Lara state, complain that due to lack of water in the area they choose to bathe in the sewers of the city after 50 hours without electricity, according to users on the network. social Twitter.

An elderly person and two children entered the sewer to be able to clean themselves, having no light since Thursday, March 7 when a massive blackout affected all the states of the national territory.

"Since Thursday we are taking a bath here, and this is what all the communities are doing, and they have to cook with a stove near my house because we do not have gas either," the man complained.

The cut in Caracas and the rest of the country began on Thursday afternoon and, after briefly resuming supplies in some areas on Friday, the failure lasted until Saturday.

10 / 03.- Recovering the system could take several hours more "Maybe on Sunday night or Monday morning the service has been completely re-established," said Ali Briceño, Executive Secretary of the Federation of Workers of the Electrical Industry.

The problem is in the transmission line, he explained: "From the Malena electrical substation, located north of the Bolívar state, on the banks of the Orinoco River, to the Guri dam, which is in Puerto Ordaz, the weeds had grown in such a way that there was a vegetation fire that caused the 3 lines of 765 kW to come out, 2 due to heating and the other due to overload ".

He added: "Automatically the protections worked and the Guri machines went out. When that happens you have to calibrate the frequency and the people who have the capacity and technical knowledge are no longer with us.

He noted that the phenomenon of migration has impacted on the payrolls of the state electricity. "The eminently technical staff of the corporation is gone," he said.

He said that the Guri dependence is close to 80%, which is why the thermoelectric power plants can not supply the population with electricity: "On top of that, maintenance has not been done to the transformers or anything, which makes that we are adrift and without any guarantee. "

Briceño explained that the reincorporation to the interconnected system that comes from the Guri is done by states. "What happens is that there are more than 20 entities out, so if the income is very fast then there is a risk that there will be another collapse and it should be restarted, as it happened," he said. He reported that 70% of the country's transformers have reached their useful life.

"Apart from lack of maintenance there may be other sensitive events," he warned.

There was no "cyber attack"

Briceó dismissed the possibility that there was a cybernetic attack on the Guri: "We have to clarify that the government, especially the minister Jorge Rodríguez, lies with cynicism and self-confidence. That is impossible, more when we have already located what was the fault".

For the NATIONAL
MARCH 9, 2019 10:50 PM | UPDATED ON MARCH 9, 2019 10:59 PM
This Saturday the history of the electric faults had two faces: one of the Caraqueños who had recovered the service during the dawn and the citizens that reside in the interior of the country that continue without service since Thursday at 4:56 pm.

After 55 hours, the fears of Venezuelans about what would happen to their food became a nightmare because it is no longer possible to refrigerate them, they are rotting.

"I got a meat and some vegetables that I had in the fridge. We had to eat the ham and the cheese that we had because it was going to be damaged too, "said Emma Castro for El Nacional .

Castro lives in Guarenas, a city where the heat affects its inhabitants on a daily basis and according to their criteria accelerated the decomposition of their food.

The shops closed to the impossibility of collecting their products became part of the landscape from this Thursday. Locals that have an electric plant and can keep their doors open concentrate people who go out to the streets looking to buy supplies.

Fixed and mobile telephone connections as well as the Internet are affected. Venezuelans who are abroad express their desperation through social networks trying to get someone to respond to their messages.

"How to be calm when your family in Venezuela is rotting the little food they have in the fridge with more than 40 hours without electricity," says Luisa María in her Twitter account.

The inhabitants of Caracas have had to resort to public spaces to achieve a signal. The Altamira distributor, the Digitel tower, the Movistar tower and the Sphere of Soto are some of the points where there is a stable mobile signal and where there are numerous cars parked looking for a telephone connection.

Health centers continue to be affected by the impossibility of functioning due to the lack of power plants. The director of Codevida, Francisco Valencia, reported that 15 people died in the country due to lack of dialysis. Zulia 9, Trujillo 2 and Pérez Carreño 4.

The patients who should receive treatment report that before the blackout they only received one hour of treatment at the Urológico Valencia.

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