The United States has said it will withdraw all remaining diplomatic staff from Venezuela as Nicolás Maduro accused Donald Trump of masterminding a “demonic” plot to force him from power by crippling the country’s electricity system with an imperialist “electromagnetic attack”.

The secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, announced the decision to vacate the US embassy in the crisis-stricken country’s capital, Caracas, late on Monday.

“This decision reflects the deteriorating situation in #Venezuela as well as the conclusion that the presence of US diplomatic staff at the embassy has become a constraint on US policy,” Pompeo tweeted.
Venezuela’s worst power and communications outage on Friday deepened a sense of isolation and decay, endangering hospital patients, forcing schools and businesses to close and cutting people off from their families, friends and the outside world.

While electricity returned to some parts of Caracas nearly 24 hours after lights, phones and the internet stopped working, several other populous cities remained in the dark as evening approached.
Venezuelans have grown begrudgingly accustomed to power cuts, but nothing like the one that hit during rush hour Thursday evening, sending thousands of people on long nighttime treks in the dark to their homes. It reached virtually every part of the oil-rich country of 31 million, which was once Latin America’ wealthiest but is now beset by shortages and hyperinflation projected by the International Monetary Fund to reach a staggering 10 million percent this year, compelling about one-tenth of its population to flee in recent years.

Venezuelans struggling to put food on the table worried that the few items in their fridges would spoil. One hospital advocate reported there were at least two confirmed deaths due to the outage: A baby in a neonatal unit and a patient at the children’s hospital. Venezuelans with chronic conditions liked diabetes searched for ice to preserve their limited supplies of medicines.

The blackout promptly became a point of dispute between Maduro, who blamed sabotage engineered by the “imperialist United States,” and U.S.-backed opposition leader Juan Guaido, who said state corruption and mismanagement that have left the electrical grid in shambles were the cause. Guaido, the leader of Venezuela’s National Assembly, returned from a Latin American tour to Venezuela on Monday in order to escalate his campaign to topple Maduro and hold elections and called for new protests on Saturday.

Many of the more than 3.4 million Venezuelans who have fled thus far left with valuable skills— including energy expertise — and the government’s allegations of a saboteurs’ plot was met with skepticism by many in Caracas.