CARACAS - Seventeen people have died in Venezuela's massive power outage, "murdered" by the government of President Nicolas Maduro, opposition leader Juan Guaido alleged Sunday.
Guaido, Venezuela's self-declared interim president, said Sunday that 16 states continued to be completely without power, while six had partial power. He said the private sector had lost at least $400 million from power outages.
Electricity was cut to 70% of the South American nation late last week, and officials warned that hospitals were at risk.
A dark corridor at Miguel Perez Carreno hospital, in Caracas, during the outage March 8.
"Venezuela has truly collapsed already," Guaido told CNN Sunday in an interview in a sweltering hotel room in the Venezuelan capital -- another byproduct of the blackouts.
"There is no service in the hospitals. These were the best hospitals in the country. If we are in the capital what is it like kilometers inside Venezuela where there hasn't been or there has been very little gasoline with periodic cuts in electricity, without basic goods, with inefficient public transportation? You can say with all responsibility that Venezuela has already collapsed."
Guaido said the opposition had recorded 17 "murders" during the blackout.
"I can't call it anything else, due to lack of electricity. Imagine if in your country, you wake to the news that there's been four days without electricity because they steal from electricity plants and 17 people died. That's murder,"
Maduro has blamed the United States for the blackout, telling supporters at a rally Saturday that the nation's electric grid had been sabotaged. The United States has attributed the outage to the Maduro regime's "incompetence."
But Guaido said that the Maduro government's accusations of a US cyberattack were absurd. Venezuela's main power plant is full of aging, analog machinery not connected to any network, he said.
"We are in the middle of a catastrophe that is not the result of a hurricane, that is not the result of a tsunami," Guaido said. "It's the product of the inefficiency, the incapability, the corruption of a regime that doesn't care about the lives of Venezuelans."
At a press conference Sunday, Guaido said he will call for a "state of national emergency" in a special session of parliament on Monday.
He said talks have been held with Germany, Japan, Brazil and Colombia to seek their support. Guaido said there is $1.5 billion available from multilateral organizations to take care of services in Venezuela. He did not say where the money was or how the funds could be accessed.
Guaido again appealed to the military to "stop hiding the dictator," referring to Maduro.
