Darkness under Chavismo
The Inequities of Rural Electrification in Venezuela
Venezuela, like most countries in Latin America, has long suffered from a deep and entrenched divide between its urban and its rural populations. The capital of Caracas is home to most of the country’s wealth, and 38 percent of its richest households; other urban areas like Valencia and Maracaibo have similar concentrations of wealth and status. Meanwhile the country’s rural areas have long suffered from isolation and exploitation, a process that has only accelerated as the country becomes increasingly urbanized. Over the past decade, these rural areas have suffered disproportionately from rolling blackouts and power cuts that have struck the country. This inequality has been variously ascribed to historical demographic shifts, economic mismanagement, and malicious government policy. It is likely that a combination of these factors are what is keeping rural Venezuelans in the dark.
Background
Many aspects of modern Venezuela — both the gulf between urban and rural citizens, and the development of a lucrative, but highly-stratified economy dependent on commodities — can be traced to Juan Vicente Gomez, a prototypical caudillo who dominated Venezuelan politics from 1908 to 1935. Beginning in the 1920s, Gomez opened the country’s oil fields to exploration, accelerating not only an economic boom but also an overnight transition from agrarian to industrial economy. by 1928 Venezuela became the world's leading exporter of petroleum, second only to the United States in total petroleum production (Haggerty, 1990, 50-51). Oil revenues generated from Venezuela’s newfound export economy helped successive governments fund lavish infrastructure and public works programs in the big cities like Caracas and Maracaibo. On account of its wealth and cosmopolitan glamor, the country gained the nickname of the “Saudi Venezuela” (Crawford, 2020). With the meteoric rise of the urban population — which ballooned from around 50 percent of the population in 1950 to upwards of 85 percent by the late 1980s — there emerged a rural class that was left out of the prosperity. As Haggerty notes, the llanero ranchers and Andean peasants continued living a rugged existence, sharing “few values or perspectives with their fellow citizens from the capital” (56). Out of sight in the Andes highlands or the Amazon rainforests, they were effectively denied the spoils of the country's riches.
Electrification was one of the infrastructure programs that oil funds allowed the government to implement — though, again, the rural populations of the Andes and the Amazon saw few immediate benefits from these advancements. By 1985, all the population centers with more than 1,000 inhabitants were electrified (Leduchowicz-Municio, et al, 2022). It was only in this decade that the government began implementing alternative renewable energies, assisting 5,800 rural inhabitants through micro-hydroelectric energy (Leduchowicz-Municio, et al).
The oil boom of the mid-20th century did not last forever. The collapse of the petrostate in the 1990s threw the country into a protracted period of economic and political turmoil, which eventually culminated in the election of the left-wing Hugo Chavez in 2003. With Chavez’s radical policies, there was a renewed focus on poverty alleviation and ambitious infrastructure projects, funded by oil revenues — a Marxist take on the Saudi Venezuela. For the rural areas of the country, a top infrastructure priority became electrification; while over 96 percent of the country was electrified in 2005, there remained nearly one million people outside of the urban areas that lacked electrical access. Chavez formed the National Electrical Corporation (CORPOELEC) in 2007, a state-owned utility provider to manage electrification projects on a national scale. Under CORPOELEC, the state launched various minor initiatives to extend the national transmission grid to rural parts of the country (Leduchowicz-Municio, et al). In 2010, the National Assembly declared that universal energy access was a human right, and thus a responsibility of (and subject to monopoly by) the state (Celis and Soto, 2022). Indeed, under Chavez, there were some strides made towards connecting rural Venezuelans to the rest of the energy grid. Under the “Sembrando Luz” (Sowing Light) project, electricity was extended to over 300,000 inhabitants of rural and indigenous communities. The government also implemented subsidies for working-class families (specifically, those with incomes less than half the minimum wage) known as the “Tarifa Social” (Social Tariff). This subsidy varied gradually depending on the level of energy consumption — 10% for 101–220 kilowatt hours (kWh) per month, 40% for 311-100 kWh/month, and 65% for 0–30 kWh/month — but went a long way towards making electrical access affordable for rural communities. For ethnic minority settlements, such as indigenous villages and quilombolas (afro-descendant villages), electricity was completely subsidized up to 50 kWh/month. Through Sembrando Luz, the Tarifa Social, and various other initiatives, the number of Venezuelans without any access to electricity had been cut to 400,000 by 2013 (Leduchowicz-Municio, et al). These accomplishments, though, have been severely undermined since then.
Venezuela’s economy slid into disarray in the middle of the 2010s. The crisis was largely a result of the oil glut that had the effect of depressing prices for what had become virtually the country’s only export; it was only compounded by the severe and systemic economic mismanagement of Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro. With the crisis — and the worsening effect of sanctions from the United States — many of the early Chavista reforms began to unravel. First among these were Chavez’s ambitious electrification projects, connecting the pockets of rural Venezuela to the rest of the country. In 2010, the country faced a severe energy crisis, after a period of drought caused a cascade failure at Guri Dam, the country’s biggest hydroelectric power plant. The government implemented rolling blackouts throughout much of the country (though, notably, not in Caracas) to save power while water levels at Guri returned to normal. A similar crisis occurred in 2016, when the country experienced over a month of four-hour blackouts every day and government employees were ordered to work a four-day week (Sabatini and Patterson). 2019 saw the beginning of the worst of the country’s energy crisis, as another failure at the Guri Dam on March 7 caused a widespread blackout over all of Venezuela’s 23 states; the neighboring, largely rural Brazilian state of Roraima was also affected. Though power was restored to much of the country a week later, many areas have still faced persistent rolling blackouts since March 2019.
Literature Review
Like many of the initial Chavista reforms, Venezuela’s progress towards expanding rural electrification was generally seen as a success story; it appeared to be a way to erase the deep, historic inequities between rural and urban Venezuelan society. From a Marxist perspective, this progress came as a result of the public sector — the establishment of CORPOELEC, the Tarifa Social, the Sembrando Luz program were all examples of ambitious, and at times heavy-handed, state action. Hugo Chavez, the great Bolivarian ideologue, called it an “electricity revolution” (Armario, 2019). This suggests that he saw electrification not only as a material change for rural communities, but rather, as a symbolic step towards the restructuring of a highly-stratified Venezuelan society. Ahlborg and Nightingale, in their exploration of rural electrification initiatives in Tanzania, expound on this notion of electricity as a social unifier:
Electricity is not a vital resource in and of itself, it is an energy carrier, a power potential that resides in the electricity infrastructure. If combined with other technologies, it can transform and enhance human capacity to communicate, carry out mechanical work, catalyze chemical reactions, etc. [...] Its very presence reconfigures social relations: like the electric grid, it symbolizes power and authority, it generates expectations. (390)
However, Ahlborg and Nightingale qualify this conceptualization by noting that the social and ideological benefits of electrification are always subject to their environment:
The degree to which electrification becomes a catalyst for economic and social change at the local level is conditioned by the wider political economy and other factors and processes limiting the economic impact electricity services can have on rural communities. (396)
This prediction has been prescient in Venezuela, where “other factors and processes” have caused increasingly large swaths of the country — and especially rural communities — to suffer unpredictable blackouts and service interruptions. Many commentators have criticized the Chavista program of state-sponsored electrification as meddling with the free market. These economic liberals say that the act of intervention itself has destabilized Venezuela’s ability to generate its own power. By freezing utility costs, subsidizing payments for the poor, and extending electricity to the most remote areas of the country, the state has inadvertently stretched the electrical grid to its limit. In Venezuela, Mistler-Ferguson writes, “consumers pay only 20% of the real costs of producing power, delivering Venezuelans the lowest electricity prices in Latin America.” From an economic perspective, by making electricity more accessible without generating more of it, the state has increased demand without a corresponding increase in supply. As a result, the electrical grid suffers from being both poorly managed, poorly maintained, and “extremely overused” (2021).
Other liberal commentators, perhaps of a more Keynesian stripe, have focused less on the interventionism itself and more on the chronic mismanagement of the energy sector. For example, CORPOELEC faces a severe shortage of qualified engineers, technicians, administrators, and other professionals. Instead, it is run by a military general with next-to-no qualifications in electrical administration. The gross negligence and corruption is endemic to the energy sector (certainly with PDVSA, the state-owned oil company), but it has particularly dangerous effects with respect to rural electrification. As one American news correspondent in Venezuela pointed out:
You can make an argument that certain industries or certain types of companies might be better under public control. Many countries have public utilities. But if you’re going to go out and buy up private countries and put them under government control, you ought to make an effort to run them well — to invest in them and to hire competent administrators. Chavez didn’t do those things. [...] It’s fine if you believe as a matter of policy that Corpoelec should charge next to nothing for the only thing it has to sell — electricity. But Corpoelec still needs money from somewhere to operate adequately. That wasn’t in the plan. (Neuman, 2022, 165)
The Issue Today
The problems with Venezuela’s electrical grid are well-documented. Since the 2019 Guri Dam incident – where 46 people died – the rolling blackouts across the country have only gotten worse. Unreliable electrical service has had wide-reaching knock-on effects. Intermittent blackouts mean that Venezuelans can no longer rely on telecommunications, hospital technology, food storage, and even running water. The situation in the country has been likened to the aftermath of a natural disaster — albeit one that is “entirely man-made” (Rendon, 2019). Since 2020, the frequency of rolling blackouts (implemented to avoid catastrophic overloading of the power grid) has increased by 22 percent (Mawad, 2023). And while the whole country has been affected by the crisis, it is clear that rural communities have borne the brunt of state-enforced power rationing. Mawad goes as far to state that many of these blackouts go unreported in official statistics precisely because they are carried out in rural areas.
Venezuelans use the most energy per capita in South America – a direct result of the country’s disproportionately-high levels of urbanization (Carroll, 2013, 211). And while the Venezuelan government does not release statistics about the distribution of its power-rationing, it has clearly demonstrated in the past its preference to secure electricity access for urban centers — at the expense of rural areas. During the energy crisis of 2010, Chavez was confronted with the need to lower the country’s energy consumption. However, Carroll points out that “El Comandante” did not either (a) reduce subsidies (the Tarifa Social) to raise prices and lowering demand, or (b) ration electricity throughout the country with rolling blackouts. Instead, Chavez took the politically-expedient option: his government kept the lights on in all the cities except the most rural and isolated, Ciudad Guyana, in the remote Amazon state of Bolivar (211).
Politically, the strategy largely succeeded. By 2011, Caracas, the comandante’s electoral priority, was privileged with regular electricity. Provincial cities and towns received the remainder, which still meant sporadic blackouts but not, the palace calculated, to the point of provoking collective revolt. [...] Ciudad Guyana had paid the price of having too few voters to threaten the government. (Carroll, 2013, 211)
Researcher Leonardo Maldonado offers a similar analysis of the present-day situation. He says that the government has pursued a policy of cutting power to rural areas “to avoid protests,” by ensuring that urban areas have a (relatively) steady supply. Maldonado developed a model mapping Venezuela’s poverty rates onto geospatial light emission data. He concluded that, as a result of the unreliable electrical service for the country’s rural populations, the levels of rural poverty have risen significantly. In one state, Amazonas, the rural poverty rate rose to 90 percent of the population, from 76 percent just six years earlier (Maldonado, 2023)
Solutions and Conclusion
There’s no clear answer that would fix Venezuela’s electrical infrastructure overnight. As has been demonstrated, the stratification between urban and rural populations has been entrenched by over a century of economic and social development. Two decades of Chavista rule have not been enough to overcome these disparities — in fact, it’s clear that Chavista policies have actually worsened the situation in many respects. While the national transmission grid covers a larger percentage of Venezuelans than in other Latin American countries, it’s become obvious that many of these people have power in name only — they may own refrigerators and air conditioning units, but can’t expect to use them for more than a few hours a day, if at all.
Sabatini and Patterson offer a few steps that might be taken towards improving electrical access for rural populations in Venezuela. Firstly, electrical output and grid capacity must be increased to meet excess demand. Not only is the current transmission system severely degraded (thanks to poor maintenance and administration), it is heavily dependent on hydroelectric power — and in particular, on the aforementioned Guri Dam, which generates 80% (yes, you read that right) of the country’s power. Failures at generation points, especially at the Guri Dam, can (and do) have catastrophic consequences. By expanding to other renewable energy sources such as wind or solar power – or even by tapping into the country’s vast natural gas reserves – Venezuela would be able to diversify its energy supply to make it less susceptible to generation shocks. Secondly, they argue that the energy sector in the country requires major overhaul in terms of personnel; professionalizing CORPOELEC, and removing political and military appointees, would go a long way in assuring a competent administration. Finally, they suggest phasing out or rolling back subsidies on electricity prices (like the Tarifa Social) to reduce excess and wasteful demand – though they acknowledge that this would be politically challenging for any government, much less the left-wing Chavistas (2021).
Ultimately, all of these solutions can only be implemented through political means — and it is unclear whether the Maduro government has the strength, or even the willingness, to effect them. Because of the imbalance in Venezuela’s population distribution, Maduro is far more reliant on the support of the larger urban population than on the rural population. Consequently, as long as the energy crisis persists, his government is incentivized to shift the burden onto rural communities, which pose little threat to his power base. As long as the status quo persists, the people of rural Venezuela will be kept in the dark.
