CARACAS, Venezuela — As if daily life in Venezuela wasn’t hard enough people across the country will now have to add electricity to their list of things they’ll have to do without.
On Monday, President Nicolás Maduro’s government began rationing power in 18 states for up to four hours a day in a bid to save energy until water levels stabilize at the nation’s largest dam.
Even in Caracas, which is being spared the cuts, outages have become more frequent. Over the weekend residents in a poor neighborhood of El Calvario, on the city’s outskirts, blocked roads to protest what they said had been 29 hours without service.
While Maduro blames saboteurs and the El Niño weather phenomenon for the outages, his opponents fault a lack of investment in the nation’s power grid.