A month-long blackout in Jennifer Naranjo’s neighbourhood in the Venezuelan port city of Maracaibo leaves her anxious. She is eight months pregnant and passes hot, sleepless nights with no air conditioning, swatting away mosquitoes, worried about her unborn daughter’s future.

“I dream about getting ahead for my baby,” said Naranjo, whose husband left in January to find work in Chile. “In Venezuela, the situation gets worse every day.” Blackouts are nothing new under two decades of socialist rule.

But they’ve grown more frequent, and are lasting longer, as the nation’s economy hits a breaking point with hyperinflation making increasingly scarce food and medicine unaffordable for many.

Naranjo’s La Chinita neighbourhood has gone without power since late March, when a transformer exploded. Officials repeatedly promised the repair parts would arrive the next day. So far they have not come.

The four-block area is a small symptom of a more widespread problem that is generating unrest across much of Venezuela, including Maracaibo, a city of 1.5 million people that has long exported energy in the form of oil across the world.

Venezuela’s government doesn’t publish figures charting power outages, but the human rights organisation Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflict reports that blackouts prompted 325 street protests across Venezuela in the first three months of 2018.

A massive blackout put most of Maracaibo in the dark for Christmas Eve, and since then officials have rationed power across the sprawling city. Scheduled blackouts eat up at least 11 hours a day, not counting unplanned failures.

Venezuela’s status as home to the world’s largest fossil fuel reserves should have made it immune to an energy crisis; however, experts say the power crisis is the government’s own making

With air conditioners idle and daytime temperatures often nearing 35 degrees Celsius, families throw open their doors and windows to allow in any hint of a breeze along with mosquitoes.

Naranjo, 20, fears a bite could infect her and her daughter, Pamela, with the Zika virus, which has stricken about 70 of Maracaibo’s infants with microcephaly, according to the local charity My Miracle Foundation.

With failing light switches and wall plugs, residents also can’t charge phones or run television sets, so they often pass time chatting with neighbours in the street. They have to cook and eat by candles, which are costly.

“We can’t wait any longer,” said homemaker Elsa de Suarez, 58, who says her lifeless refrigerator doesn’t allow her to keep food from spoiling. “It’s an emergency.” Venezuela’s status as home to the world’s largest fossil fuel reserves should have made it immune to an energy crisis.

It also has the Guri Dam, one of the world’s largest hydro-electric projects and the cornerstone of an electrical grid that has now fallen into disrepair.

Experts say only two or three of Maracaibo’s 24 fuel-powered turbines still run after years of neglect, eking out just 10 per cent of their previous output.

Major General Luis Motta, Maduro’s minister of electrical power, blamed a series of recent outages on saboteurs’ attempting to undermine the government. They attacked power substations using Molotov cocktails, he said on state TV, without providing evidence. He didn’t respond to a request from The Associated Press for comment.

However, experts say the power crisis is the government’s own making. Powerful officials have been accused in US court proceedings of looting investments earmarked for the electrical system and the country has kept home power bills among the cheapest in the world, around 1 cent a month, meaning the grid depends heavily on subsidies from a government.

Winston Cabas, president of the Association of Electrical Engineers of Venezuela, estimates that it would take an infusion of $50 billion over a decade to restore the country’s electrical system. “The problem is not sabotage or terrorism,” said Cabas. “The problem is corruption.”

In downtown Maracaibo, more than 100 senior citizens recently grew frustrated standing in line for hours outside a bank waiting for the power to come so they could cash their monthly pension checks to buy food.

Across the bay, a group of fisherman mending shrimping nets paused when they heard the hum of their refrigerator die from another outage.

Many of La Chinita’s residents gather each evening on a corner in front of a mustard-coloured flat-roofed home. Bug repellent is too expensive, so one man burns a cardboard egg carton, which helps keep the mosquitoes away.

A woman flips through the pages on a clipboard detailing the blackout’s impact on La Chinita’s 135 residents, including 29 young children and at least three bedridden elderly neighbours.

Naranjo eats by the light of a shrinking candle stub. Unable to charge her phone at home, she can only talk to her husband in Chile once every three or four days. For now, Naranjo remains fixated on finding money to deliver her baby in a good clinic and on buying her own mosquito net.

“Everything is so expensive,” she says. The candle flickers from a breeze and she stops eating to cup her hand behind the flame to shield it from blowing out and leaving her in the dark. —AP

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, May 7th, 2018