If anyone wants to understand why this is happening in one of the largest oil producers in the world, there is only one word. Corruption. At every single level of the government.

The government can blame El Niño all you want, but they can't hide the fact that they stole most of the money that was invested in non-working power plants all over the country. I worked in 3 of those (one from Derwick, see below) and saw power plants from 1995 that were sold as new at 3x the price of a NEW power plant.

One of the companies is called Derwick. Run by some guys with ties to the government, some as young as 23 years old, with ZERO experience in the field. They are all now multi-millionaires.

You can read more here: http://infodio.com/021014/how/to/steal/70/million/one/day/de...

http://infodio.com/030813/jose/aguilar/derwick/associates/bi...

http://www.infodio.com is a site that tracks a lot of corruption cases. It is of course, blocked in Venezuela.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derwick_Associates

http://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelan-energy-company-derwic...

https://cryptome.org/2015/06/ve-us-corruption.htm

More on the power crisis in general:

http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/160227/nation...

I can go on and on about this. But this basically boils down to massive, massive corruption that has penetrated Venezuela at every level.

Where I live, we've already had blackouts 2-3 times a week. Once this problem hits Caracas, the capital, we know things are going to get bad. The government has done everything possible to keep things normal there but they might not be able to for much longer.