Latin American Economy & Business - September 2013 (ISSN 1741-7430)

On 3 September Venezuela experienced one of the biggest power cuts seen in any Latin American country in the last decade. The capital Caracas and 23 states suddenly found themselves with partial or zero electricity supply. About 70% of the country was affected by the outage, forcing much of the economy to grind to a halt and incurring economic losses estimated at up to US$1bn.  What caused it? Here we look at some of the claims and counter-claims.