Fear and despair surge, but electricity doesn’t
Liliana Labarca, a 23year-old Venezuelan university student, has slept with a whistle beside her bed since Monday. Her uncle has also had one at hand while doing watches on the roof of her house in Barrio Calendario, one of the most dangerous and populous slums of Maracaibo, in northwestern Venezuela.
They plan to make noise in the darkness of the night if robbers come around the neighborhood as a general power outage has left her community — and 80 percent of the country — without electricity for four days in a row.
“These days have sucked,” she says one morning while waiting for a bus to take her back home from the north side of the city.
Maracaibo, a city of 1.6 million residents, is about to enter the fourth day of the general power outage that occurred around 9:45 p.m. on Monday and that affected at least 20 Venezuelan states.
She has felt sick with worry because the nearby areas of her slum were the epicenter of violent looting of dozens of shops and stores when the first blackout of the month occurred from March 7-13.
After three days of fury during that outage, 520 stores had been ransacked in Maracaibo, the capital city of the most populous state, Zulia, and the richest region in oil production in Venezuela. Labarca and
While the electricity has been going on and off in Caracas and other regions of Venezuela, the state of Zulia — especially Maracaibo and its nearby towns — has not been as fortunate.