Sabotage of the Guri Hydroelectric Plant and the Real Plot Behind Machado’s ‘Fraud’ Story

By Misión Verdad – August 31, 2024

The latest sabotage on Venezuela’s national electricity system (SEN) plunged almost the entire country into darkness from dawn until late afternoon on Friday, August 30. President Nicolás Maduro condemned the sabotage as aimed at “destroying Guri.”

The Simón Bolívar Hydroelectric Power Plant, better known as Guri, in the state of Bolívar, is the main source of electricity generation in Venezuela. Guri was heavily attacked in March 2019 as part of Juan Guaidó’s self-proclamation, leaving 80% of the national territory without electricity for several days.

Authorities reported at the time that Guri faced a combination of technical and cyber attacks.

This time, the consequences were less severe in terms of the duration of the blackout, thanks to the protection system that Venezuelan authorities have been developing since 2019 in preparation for a similar event.

The Centella Plan was also activated to protect the population and prevent any violent disturbances that might accompany the electrical sabotage.

President Maduro also reported that two days before the presidential elections, on July 26, a gang “from the department of Norte de Santander (Colombia) was captured in Ureña, state of Táchira, carrying construction plans, equipment and money to exploit, burn and catastrophically destroy an electrical plant in that border town.”

Information confirmed the post-electoral destabilization plans of María Corina Machado, the visible face of the far-right opposition. The aim of these destabilization attempts is “regime change” with violent maneuvers, including the use of criminal gangs that claimed human lives and destroyed public and private property.

The August 30 electrical sabotage is part of the same coup, an operation that was accompanied by other tactics and events that, regardless of the circumstances, were neutralized by Venezuelan law enforcement agencies.

The Background to the ‘Fraud’ Narrative
To make their story of “election fraud” come true, Machado and his party assembled a series of activities and perpetrators to generate shock forces and demonstrate their lack of recognition from state institutions.

The use of criminal gangs has borne fruit in terms of deadly results, with protocols that pursue a subversive agenda and are secretly associated with the critical mass of opposition protests in 2013, 2014, 2017 and 2019. This is the main move of the opposition elite: gunshots to the back and head, people killed inside or on the fringes of the demonstrations, and criminal malice.

In general, the aggressive far-right opposition attempts to use the criminal world to generate continued violence and sabotage essential infrastructure.

According to journalist Eligio Rojas, there is a combination of elements that point to criminal and political violence, which perpetuates the scenario of a coup by Machado and the politicians who support her.

The fact that the authorities have deactivated most of the violent incidents does not mean that we should disqualify these events from our analysis. After all, they are part of a plan to remove President Maduro from office and they show characteristics of last month’s coup.

1. The fight against the Tren del Llano gang continues. Their cells in Guárico are surrounded by security forces, their henchmen are arrested and their war material is confiscated.
2. The police-military operations of the Ministry of Penitentiary are considering the restructuring of Venezuela’s prison system, as prison gang leaders play an active role in political violence. President Maduro has placed special emphasis on “refining, cleaning up, purging, cleaning up and reinstitutionalizing this Ministry.”
3. Military weapons and war materials stolen by the opposition have been recovered.
4. The arrest of a former Colombian military officer involved in assassinations is in line with the usual involvement of Colombian sectors in political violence in Venezuela.
5. The assassination of Reinaldo Manuel Solórzano Millán, alias ‘Reinaldito’, and the deactivation of the criminal group he led, on Sunday, August 18, eliminated the possibility of a transportation strike and associated guarimbas in the La Vega and El Paraíso neighborhoods of Caracas. .
6. On August 17, 6,000 military and police officers neutralized opposition plans to carry out criminal actions similar to those of July 29 and 30 in Petare, El Valle, El Guarataro and other neighborhoods in western and southern Caracas.

All these elements, together with the attack on the SEN, show that in the background of the “fraud” narrative, there are criminal plans and sabotage of vital infrastructure, a continuation of the series of events that have long been intended to destabilize the daily lives of Venezuelans.

President Maduro: Attack on electricity system aimed at destroying Guri dam

The voice of the people
The trends of the Venezuelan conflict scenario work along clear lines. The objectives of the opposition are explicit and their non-recognition of the Venezuelan state and its institutional apparatus is a way of not recognizing the election results.

The reaction of the majority of the population was to resume their daily lives, against the tide of the event that wanted to break the fundamental factors of daily life in the country, in a collective reflection on the experiences of four years earlier.

Once again, the overwhelming majority of the population demonstrated its lack of interest in getting caught up in an unpredictable situation with clear fratricidal intentions, in an expression that goes beyond the strictly party-political framework.

The peace and predictability of a stable life remain the main principle, and the same can be said, in a proportional sense, about the de facto rejection of attempts to generate violence.

In this sense, the fact that the entire country has emerged from the state of emergency, largely imposed by measures that are expected to be repeated, is the best proof that the population is still in favor of economic recovery and coexistence.

This is an even greater enemy for María Corina Machado and her gang of advocates of national suicide, indispensable for the neoliberal reconquest of the Venezuelan territory and its people.

It is clear that the acts of sabotage, the sanctions program and the violence transferred to the underworld are means to create a situation in which the population turns against the state in a chaotic and violent manner and does the dirty work of the opposition.

Machado and especially her puppeteers keep making the same analytical error, the same strategic error, and they achieve nothing but direct damage and its consequences.

However, the population is resisting bossy interference, because the willingness to overcome the major political, social and economic challenges comes through all possible forms of political dialogue and not through the highway of cannon fodder.

That is the important argument, and it is not the government that ignores it, but those who are looking for a solution according to their whims and standards, only because “until the end” no harm will be done to the protagonists of the coup.

(Truthful message)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

OT/JRE/SC

Mission Truth

Misión Verdad is a Venezuelan investigative journalism website with a socialist perspective in defense of the Bolivarian Revolution