The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

we had word of massive power outages across Venezuela, exacerbated by the decrepit state of the country’s power grid. My first thought was that Guaidó or someone had decided to take matters into their own hands. But whatever the cause or the extent or duration of the outage, it had to hurt Maduro, emblematic as it was of the overall disaster the regime represented for the people. Reporting on the effects of the outage came slowly because almost all Venezuelan domestic telecommunications had been knocked out. What we learned as each day passed confirmed the devastation. Almost the entire country was blacked out, the Caracas airport was closed, the security services seemed to have disappeared, there were reports of looting, and the cacerolazos started again, showing sustained popular dissatisfaction with the regime. How bad was the damage? Some months later, we learned, a visiting foreign delegation concluded the country’s electricity-generating infrastructure was “beyond repair.” The regime tried to blame America, but people generally understood that, like the disintegration of Venezuela’s petroleum industry, the national power grid had also deteriorated over two decades of Chavista rule, because the government had failed to undertake necessary maintenance and new capital investment. And where had the money gone that was required for the state-owned oil company and the national power grid? Into the hands of the thoroughly corrupt regime. If this wasn’t the stuff of popular ...