Of the 30 million Venezuelans, more than 18 million live in neighborhood blocks with planned rationed electricity.

The plan establishes 3 hour cuts but network users report up to 10 running days without light.

Venezuela experienced three massive blackouts in March 2019. It was the first time that almost the entire country was without light for several days. The government implemented an electric rationing plan in April. Prodavinci estimated that 60% of Venezuelans live in neighborhoods subject to formal rationing. We identified that 241 educational centers are rationed and 158 lose the equivalent of one week of classes per month. Of the 196 health centers that appear in the plan, 42 spend the equivalent of more than three days without electricity per month. The rationing is uneven: while Cojedes has almost all of its population in rationed districts, Amazonas, Bolívar, Delta Amacuro, Distrito Capital and Vargas have no official rationing.

In social networks, users report that power outages are worse than what the plan says. They are applied in areas that are not included in the rationing and do not have electricity until several consecutive days. Corpoelec’s (state electric service provider) plan is an acknowledgment that the State does not guarantee continuous service to the entire country. Although it had to end in April, the authorities have said that the rationing can last a year.

Every day there is formal rationing somewhere in the country. The affected areas can spend between 15 and 21 hours without electricity per week.

The rationing plan includes 18 of 23 states in Venezuela. Capital District, Vargas, Amazonas, Delta Amacuro and Bolívar are excluded. The rationing consists of an electric cut of three continuous hours. The plan is organized by districts and within them the sectors that are rationed are identified. The rationing schedules are organized into five blocks or schemes (A, B, C, D, E), which define the days and hours of power outages.

The electric rationing plan is applied in 574 of 1113 districts in the country. According to the projection of population for 2015 of the National Institute of Statistics (INE), the latest public data of population, in those neighborhoods live 18,422,224 Venezuelans.

Each district is assigned at least one rationing scheme. The intensity of rationing is not the same for all. There are 29 districts that have the five rationing blocks, that is, in one day they can have five different power cuts. We use a map to show the differences with colors: the darker a district, the more ration blocks are applied simultaneously.

You can navigate the map in three ways: click or hover over each district to see its rationing, clicking on the states in the upper right list or selecting the rationing blocks in the lower right corner. When selecting the states, the rationing blocks will be updated to reflect those districts.

While in some states there is no formal electric rationing, 97% of the population of the Cojedes state has districts under rationing. It is followed by Carabobo, with 92% of its population by district under rationing, and Guárico with 89%.

In Miranda, the percentage of people subject to a formal rationing plan is low because it does not include the inhabitants of the Metropolitan Area of ​​Caracas and Altos Mirandinos.

Zulia is the state where the most electrical failures are reported, even though less than 50% of its population lives under rationing according to the plan.

“It’s like having front row tickets to see the end of the world”

“My feeling is that the city is being dismantled, you see the people on the street and it’s terrible, everyone is lacking a deep and restful sleep. I feel very tired, a tiredness that we have all been carrying for a long time and one that never goes away.

When I drive down the avenue I see mattresses on the sidewalk. People sleep on the street. I sleep in my garden, on a folding bed. I put on gloves and stockings so that mosquitoes do not bite me. The Zulia people are used to enduring heat, but May has been another level. We have a thermal sensation of fifty-eight degrees.

The sense of normality was lost some time ago. I remember having power rationing in 2014. In 2017 it started again: daily four-hour, two-hour, six-hour cuts, without notice. My routine was already difficult. I do not remember what it is like to use a washing machine or take a bath in a shower. Water has not come through pipes for eight months. We pay two or three times a month to fill the tanks with water.

After the national blackout on March 7th we had six days without electricity. On two occasions we have been through 48 hours in the dark.

Now in my house the light is out for 12 hours a day. It’s usually on from 2:30am to 8:30am, in the morning and then in the evening. There are days that it comes on for two hours and then shuts off. There are days when it never comes on. We have a power plant that lasts for only four hours and six of us need it. We end up just using it for the fan and to charge the phones.

I’m a manager in a restaurant. Since the terrible March blackout, my life consists in moving merchandise, like meat and cheese, from one vendor to another. It’s a race to keep it from going bad. The light went out here, now we need to move the goods there….The light went there, we are going to return it here…. You need a body to move all those boxes. It is exhausting. When I’m going to charge gas, it takes at least 12 hours. Most stations do not have an electric plant.

I worry about my mom. She is 87 years old. She was an extremely sharp reader. She was a judge for 30 years. These last months have taken their toll. Sometimes I talk to her and she loses the thread of her ideas. I think it’s the heat and the lack of rest.

For what my friends tell me in other parts of the country, I feel we are in the most deteriorated city. The worst city in the country with the worst economy on the planet. It’s like having front row tickets to see the end of the world. “

Adelso Mestre, 42 years old. Manager of a restaurant. Parish: Coquivacoa, Maracaibo.

Education and health under rationing

In the plan there are 241 compulsory basic education centers. There could be more schools under rationing that are not mentioned in the plan, but they are located in affected areas. For the analysis, we counted only the schools that are named.

We analyzed the data of preschools, basic schools, schools, educational units and high schools. In Venezuela, basic education is taught in two shifts of five hours: the morning from 7:00am to 12:00pm noon, and then the afternoon from 1:00pm to 6:00pm.

On April 1st of this year, at the Official Gazette number 41,614 the working hours were cut from 8:00am to 2:00pm. In the educational field, the schedule was established from 7:00am until 2:00pm. This canceled the afternoon shift and the authorities did not give alternative instructions for the affected schools.

In the rationing plan there are 196 health centers explicitly named. 49 of them are hospitals. For the health sector, data from hospitals, Integral Diagnostic Centers (CDI), ambulatory centers, Mission Barrio Adentro centers and clinics specified in the rationing plan were analyzed.

“When the light goes out, it’s like life is stopped”

“I’m worried that my patients cannot keep their insulin because they cannot refrigerate it. I’ve had to find a way to get that system in. I called the Mérida Health Corporation to give us some refrigerators because they have plants and keep them lit. When we were four or five days without electricity it was a tragedy, not only for patients who needed insulin but also for those who have chemotherapy drugs that cannot be without refrigeration, they are expensive and patients usually buy them outside.

I cannot telephonize my patients when the power goes out because there is no signal, they cannot go to appointments because there is no transportation. Paying for it all gets complicated as well because there is no cash and you cannot make transfers.

Life gets very extremely difficult without electricity, everything because much more work. Before the rations I could plan. I decided when I rested and when I continued. Now I’m tied hands because I cannot advance jobs or answer mails, everything accumulates and I look for the hours to make a transfer. It is as if we were running behind the light, jogging daily in that little time that seems to be useful for humanity. When the light goes out, life stops. I feel that I am not productive or efficient for my country.”

Jueda Azkoul, 41 years old. Director of research teaching at the Autonomous Institute of the University Hospital of Los Andes and president of the directive of the First Aid Foundation of the Universidad de los Andes. Parish: El Llano, Mérida.

Lastly, we geographically located in Google Maps the health and education centers mentioned in the rationing plan. The centers not located are because they are not registered in the map, they have been located within the district to which they belong.

“We lay half sleep killing mosquitoes”

“I live in a palafito in Lake Maracaibo. Normally, the light goes from 5:00 in the morning to 11:00, and then from 2:00 in the afternoon to 12:00 at night. My routine: I get up, walk along the wooden bridges to the mainland and on the avenue. There is little transportation due to lack of gasoline. I have stopped visiting the family at the end of week, first because of the cash and because there is no transportation. Second because I’m constantly running behind the light. What I miss most is to see my family.

This past weekend we filled a large bottle of water. It was dark and on the way there one of the boards came off and I fell. My whole body fell on my elbow and I injured it. Water comes once or twice a week because of the electricity problem.

Sometimes I have to walk back from work to the house. I always leave with people I know, and it took us an hour, an hour and a half, if we went fast. A friend who is now retired comes every day and goes at night on a bicycle, risking his life because everything is dark.

In the evenings I hardly sleep while taking care of the house, and the heat does not allow one to get any sleep. We just lay there half asleep killing mosquitoes until finally we can drift off. We are caged, because insecurity is eating at us too. There are pirates on the Lake that take advantage of the darkness to steal the engines from the fishermen. Among the neighbors we have to take care of ourselves.

At night we make chopines: we put gasoline in a latica with some clothing. By doing that we are able to sit a while until we finish cooking, to talk to each other and see our faces. I tell them: ‘We are going to see each other in the day because at night we do not see each other’.

The worst thing about not having electricity is that I cannot distract myself watching television, it’s nice to be able to forget things when you watch a good movie. I miss taking cold showers because there it’s so hot here. No we are already used to drinking hot water. “

Katy Parra, 53 years old. Cleaning staff in the French Alliance. Parish: Coquivacoa, Maracaibo.

The authorities have said that the rationing could be extended up to one year. They have not reported whether the conditions of the power cuts will change, but Corpoelec has responded to reports of the failures in May based on the April rationing plan.

    Estimated at this time your sector is within the Cargo Management Plan. @igorgavidia

    – CORPOELEC Informa (@CORPOELECinfo) May 13, 2019

The order to work on special hours until 2:00 in the afternoon was extended “until the period agreed by the National Executive.” It was published in Gaceta one day after the rationing plan was in effect.

Methodology

We use optical character recognition software to convert the file of the rationing plans into a spreadsheet. The name of each of the 1,164 parishes listed in the plan was corroborated, with the document Political territorial division of Venezuela for statistical purposes of 2013, of the INE. A unique record was generated for each parish that would take into account the repetition of that instance per rationing block. This process left 574 parishes in unique records. Each one was associated with its number of inhabitants, according to INE projections for 2015, the latest official public population data. Sector information also became unique records to unify the nomenclature and abbreviations used to identify sectors. We look for locations linked to educational and health centers on Google maps and we associate latitude and longitude coordinates with each one.

Corpoelec organized the electric rationing plan through parishes. This category not only included this type of administrative dependencies, but also towns or cities that house one or several parishes. In these cases, the names were homologated according to the parishes registered by the National Institute of Statistics. Whenever the name given by Corpoelec allowed identifying it with a parish of the INE, the criterion that they were parishes was maintained although the name was equal to the municipality where the parish is located.

The base of parishes used to homologate the names of these entities can be found in these documents: Territorial Political Division of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, for statistical purposes – 2013 and Projection of the population as of June 30, according to federal entity, municipalities and parishes of the National Institute of Statistics (also used for the population calculation).

Credits
General Management: Ángel Alayón and Oscar Marcano
Head of research: Valentina Oropeza
Head of design: John Fuentes
Head of innovation: Helena Carpio
Direction of Photography: Roberto Mata
Text: Luisa Salomón, Ricardo Barbar and Francis Peña
Editing: Ángel Alayón and Valentina Oropeza
Digitization of data: Helena Carpio and Salvador Benasayag
Approval and data cleansing: Luisa Salomón, Ricardo Barbar and Francis Peña
Data analysis: Luisa Salomón, Ricardo Barbar, Francis Peña, Salvador Benasayag, Helena Carpio and Giorgio Cunto
Advice on data management: Giorgio Cunto
Home / Infographic: John Fuentes
Data visualizations (Carto): Helena Carpio
Photographs: María Alejandra Sánchez in Zulia and José Manuel Romero in Mérida.
Social networks: Salvador Benasayag