Sabotage of the Guri Hydroelectric Plant and the Real Plot Behind Machado's 'Fraud' Narrative

By Misión Verdad – Aug 31, 2024

The latest sabotage on the Venezuelan National Electrical System (SEN) plunged almost the entire country in darkness from dawn to late afternoon on Friday, August 30. President Nicolás Maduro condemned the sabotage as having the objective of “destroying Guri.”

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

At that time, authorities reported that Guri suffered a combination of technical attacks and cyberattacks.

This time, the consequences were less severe in terms of duration of the blackout due to the protection system that Venezuelan authorities developed since 2019, in anticipation of a similar event.

The Centella Plan was also activated to safeguard the people and prevent any violent disturbance that could accompany the electrical sabotage.

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

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

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

The backdrop of “fraud” narrative
In order for Machado and company to carry out their “electoral fraud” narrative, they made converge a set of activities and perpetrators to generate shock forces and display their non-recognition of state institutions.

The use of criminal gangs has borne fruit in terms of lethal results, with pprotocols utilizing a subversive agenda and covertly associated with the critical mass of opposition protests in 2013, 2014, 2017 and 2019. This is the principal move of the opposition political elite: gunshots to the back and head, people killed within or on the margins of the demonstrations, and criminal malice.

In general, the belligerent far-right opposition has attempted to use the criminal world to generate constant violence and to sabotage vital infrastructure.

According to reports by journalist Eligio Rojas, the combination of elements that point to factors of criminal and political violence continues, maintaining the scenario of a coup attempt by Machado and the politicians who support her.

The fact that the authorities have deactivated most of the violent events does not mean that we should discredit these events while analyzing them, since they are part of a plan to remove President Maduro from office and they show the characteristics of last month’s coup events.

The fight against the Tren del Llano gang continues, whose cells in Guárico are being surrounded by security forces, their associates are being arrested and their war material are being seized.
The police-military operations of the Ministry of Penitentiary contemplate the restructuring of the Venezuelan penitentiary system, since prison gang leaders have an active role in political violence. President Maduro has placed special emphasis on “fine-tuning, cleanup, purification, tidying up and re-institutionalizing this Ministry.”
Military weapons and war material stolen in the opposition’s criminal plots have been recovered.
The arrest of a former Colombian military officer involved in assassination plans is in line with the usual involvement of Colombian sectors in political violence in Venezuela.
The killing of Reinaldo Manuel Solórzano Millán, alias “Reinaldito,” and the deactivation of the criminal group he led, on Sunday, August 18, eliminated the opportunity for a transportation strike and associated guarimbas in Caracas’ La Vega and El Paraíso neighborhoods.
On August 17, 6,000 military and police officers neutralized plans of the opposition’s criminal events similar to those of July 29 and 30 in Petare, El Valle, El Guarataro and other neighborhoods of west and south Caracas.

All these elements, together with the attack on the SEN, demonstrate that in the backdrop of the “fraud” narrative there are criminal plans and sabotage of vital infrastructure, a continuation of the series of events that have intended to destabilize Venezuelans’ daily life for a long time.

President Maduro: Attack on Electrical System Aimed at Destroying Guri Dam

The voice of the people
The trends of the Venezuelan conflict scenario operate on obvious lines. The objectives of the opposition are explicit, and their non-recognition of the Venezuelan state and institutional apparatus is a way to not recognize the electoral results.

The reaction of the majority of the population was to carry on with their daily lives, once again, against the tide of the event that intended to fracture the fundamental factors of daily life in the country, in a collective reflection of the experience of four years earlier.

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

The peace and predictability of a stable life remains the cardinal principle, and the same can be said, in proportional terms, about the factual rejection of attempts to generate violence.

To that extent, the fact that the entire country has emerged from a state of emergency, largely imposed by acts that are expected to be repeated, is the greatest demonstration that the popular consensus continues to be economic recovery and coexistence.

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

It is evident that the acts of sabotage, the sanctions program, and the violence delegated to the criminal underworld are resources to create a situation where the population could be made to turn chaotically and violently against the state and do the opposition’s dirty work.

Machado and especially her puppeteers continue to commit the same analytical error, the same strategic fault, and they achieve nothing except immediate damage and its effects.

However, the people are challenging the bossy interference, since the willingness to overcome the great political, social and economic challenges goes through all possible instances of political dialogue and not through the highway of cannon fodder.

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

(Misión Verdad)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

OT/JRE/SC