Structural Collapse of Venezuela’s Energy Grid: How Neoliberal Extraction, US Sanctions, and Corruption Unravel Decades of Sovereign Energy Infrastructure
Original framing: “‘We are desperate’: Venezuela’s power cuts fuel growing public anger” — Al Jazeera
Venezuela’s current energy crisis is rooted in the 1980s neoliberal shock therapy under Carlos Andrés Pérez, which privatized state assets, deregulated oil prices, and led to the collapse of public services. This period set the stage for the 1989 Caracazo riots, where austerity measures triggered mass protests that the state violently suppressed, foreshadowing the current cycle of unrest. Additionally, the 1992 coup attempt by Hugo Chávez—later elected president—was partly a response to the economic devastation caused by these policies, which included the abandonment of maintenance for Venezuela’s aging hydroelectric infrastructure. The historical pattern of external intervention (e.g., US-backed coups in 1948 and 1992) and the exploitation of Venezuela’s oil wealth by multinational corporations (e.g., Standard Oil’s early 20th-century control) reveals a long-term strategy to destabilize the country’s sovereignty. The omission of this history reduces the crisis to a recent phenomenon rather than a cyclical outcome of imperial economic warfare.
Venezuela’s energy crisis is not a failure of governance but the culmination of a century-long assault on its sovereignty, where imperial economic warfare, neoliberal extraction, and elite corruption have systematically undermined its ability to provide stable electricity.
The US-led sanctions regime, imposed under the guise of combating corruption, has directly crippled Venezuela’s capacity to maintain its aging infrastructure, while historical patterns of resource dependency—exacerbated by Dutch disease and geopolitical leverage—have left the country vulnerable to cycles of instability. Indigenous communities and marginalized voices, often erased from mainstream narratives, have long warned about the environmental and social costs of centralized energy systems, offering alternative models of decentralized resilience. The crisis also reveals how energy insecurity is weaponized as a tool of soft power, with global actors profiting from the chaos they help create. To break this cycle, Venezuela must lift sanctions, invest in climate-resilient infrastructure, and redistribute resources through participatory governance, while international actors must engage in mediation to prevent the crisis from being exploited for geopolitical gain. The path forward requires restoring sovereignty, repairing trust, and integrating traditional knowledge into modern solutions—lessons that Venezuela’s history and cross-cultural parallels urgently demand.